Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis of Coverage, Disciplinary Profiles, and Database convergence

Abstract Web of Science and Scopus have dominated bibliometric analysis for two decades, but OpenAlex, launched in 2022 by OurResearch, challenges this duopoly through open infrastructure. This study compares the coverage, structural profiles, and overlap patterns of Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and OpenAlex (2015–2024), analysing over 105 million records across five disciplinary areas through DOI-based matching and the OpenAlex Topics taxonomy. WoS and Scopus exhibit 95% overlap with nearly identical typological distributions and thematic profiles, functioning as homogeneous infrastructure primarily oriented toward STEM evaluation. OpenAlex doubles their combined coverage but presents notable limitations, as only 67% of its records receive thematic classification and systematic metadata inconsistencies persist. Anglophone bias is pronounced across all three platforms, with 96.2% of WoS records in English, compared to 90.8% in Scopus and 77.5% in OpenAlex. Disciplinary divergence is most acute in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), where only 31% of OpenAlex SSH records appear in WoS, versus 78% in Physical Sciences. OpenAlex indexes 21 million unique DOI-tagged records absent from commercial databases. No single infrastructure captures the totality of global scholarly output. The 95% WoS–Scopus overlap, combined with 21 million OpenAlex-exclusive records, reveals the structural fragmentation of the bibliographic ecosystem. Rigorous research evaluation therefore requires multi-source strategies that recognise the complementarity between commercial curation and open comprehensiveness Keywords Bibliometric analysis, Bibliographic databases, Web of Science, Scopus, OpenAlex, Coverage, Overlap, Research evaluation, Bibliographic infrastructure, Linguistic diversity