Which Publications’ Metadata Are in Which Bibliographic Databases? A System for Exploration

The choice of databases containing publications’ metadata (i.e., bibliographic databases) determines the available publication list of any author and, thus, their public appearance and evaluation. Having all publications listed in the various bibliographic databases is therefore important for researchers. However, the average number of publications a researcher publishes per year is steadily rising, making it labor-intensive and time-consuming for authors to investigate whether all their publications are given in all bibliographic databases online. In this paper, we present RefBee, an online system that retrieves the metadata of all publications for a given author from the various bibliographic databases and indicates which publications are missing in which database. Our system is available online at http://refbee.org/ and supports Wikidata, ORCID, Google Scholar, VIAF, DBLP, Dimensions, Microsoft Academic, Semantic Scholar, and DNB/GNB. Our system not only can serve as assistance tool for more than 4.7 million researchers of any discipline and publication’s language, but also incentivizes the usage and population of Wikidata in the scholarly field.