Software issues related to cited references

Purpose – The underlying software issue related to cited references is the capability of the software to identify the specific work cited by a reference, and associate it with the correct author and journal. This paper aims to investigate this issue and to discuss the latest editions of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper the strengths and weaknesses of the Distinct Author Set feature of WoS and the Author Details feature of Scopus are discussed. Findings – The paper reveals that these tools will have an increasingly important role in refining the process of disambiguating author (and journal) names in calculating their h‐index. Originality/value – The paper provides useful information on software issues related to cited references and on the Distinct Author Set feature of WoS and the Author Details feature of Scopus.