(13 Jan 2022) 2021 is just behind us. Since January is “the Monday of the months”, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, it’s a good time to take stock of what happened at OpenCitations during the past year.
Among the numerous events, achievements and challenges that 2021 brought with it, we want to highlight five milestones which make us proud to look back:
1. We extended our coverage to well over one billion citations
During 2021, OpenCitations’ largest index COCI (the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations) was able to include for the first time the citation links involving references that had been opened at Crossref by Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, thereby greatly expanding its coverage. The last release of COCI (November 2021) is based on open references to works with DOIs within the Crossref dump dated October 2021, and, as a result, COCI now contains information on more than 1.23 billion citations involving almost 70 million publications.
A recent analysis by Alberto Martìn-Martìn (Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación, Universidad de Granada, Spain), published on the OpenCitations Blog in October, shows that the citation coverage provided by OpenCitations is approaching parity with that of the leading commercial citation indexes, Web of Science and Scopus, offering a viable alternative upon which to base open and reproducible metrics of academic performance.
For the four other milestones, visit the OpenCitations Blog here.
