Systematic analysis of coverage and usage of conference proceedings in web of science: Subproject in the Kompetenzzentrum Bibliometrie

[Introduction ...] The last part of this report describes how conference proceedings in general influence various types of bibliometric indicators. We take a look at different countries and analyze whether they profit or suffer from the inclusion of conference proceedings. Also, we compare the indicator values for various fields. This results in an overview of types of analyses, for which an in- or exclusion of conference proceedings might be advisable or not. The remainder of this report is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the state of the art and compares literature that has already dealt with the database coverage of conference proceedings and their influence on bibliometric indicators. Furthermore, the approach taken in this report and necessary definitions are explained. To better illustrate the different results of bibliometric indicators, we calculate different bibliometric indicators for five countries and compare the results for conference proceedings and journal publications in Section 3. Section 4 consists of two parts. The first part, Descriptive Analysis, shows the results for the quantitative assessment of the proceedings in the database. Using these findings as a basis, we then deduce the Implications for Bibliometric Analyses in the second part. The final section summarizes our findings and shows possibilities for future work.