mergeDbSources: Merge bibliographic data frames from supported bibliogtraphic...

In bibliometrix: Comprehensive Science Mapping Analysis

Merge bibliographic data frames from supported bibliogtraphic DBs

Description

Merge bibliographic data frames from different databases (WoS,SCOPUS, Lens, Openalex, etc-) into a single one.

Usage

mergeDbSources(..., remove.duplicated = TRUE, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

...	are the bibliographic data frames to merge.
remove.duplicated	is logical. If TRUE duplicated documents will be deleted from the bibliographic collection.
verbose	is logical. If TRUE, information on duplicate documents is printed on the screen.

Details

bibliographic data frames are obtained by the converting function convert2df. The function merges data frames identifying common tag fields and duplicated records.

When the collections to merge come from more than one database, the cited references field CR is renamed CR_raw and CR is emptied (set to the string "NA" for every document).

This is intentional, not a loss of data. Each database writes its references in its own format – WoS uses AUTHOR, YEAR, JOURNAL, DOI ... strings, Scopus writes full free-text citations, OpenAlex and Lens use identifiers – so the same cited work appears under different strings depending on the source. Keeping them in a single CR column would make every reference-based measure count the same work more than once. The original strings are preserved verbatim in CR_raw.

The practical consequence is that reference-based analyses – biblioNetwork with analysis = "co-citation" or "coupling", histNetwork, and local citation counts – are not available on a multi-database merged collection. Everything that does not rely on CR (authors, sources, keywords, affiliations, countries, collaboration and co-word networks) is unaffected. To run a citation analysis, work on the single-database collections before merging them.

Merging collections that all come from the same database leaves CR untouched.

Author names are left as the single collections carry them: the merge only harmonises how the databases punctuate them (Scopus writes the full names as REID, MONIQUE, WoS as REID MONIQUE). Import the collections you intend to merge with the same author name format – full names for all of them, or surname and initials for all of them – so that their AU fields are comparable.

Value

the value returned from mergeDbSources is a bibliographic data frame. When the sources belong to different databases, the original cited references are returned in the CR_raw column and CR is empty (see Details).

See Also

convert2df to import and convert an ISI or SCOPUS Export file in a bibliographic data frame.

biblioAnalysis function for bibliometric analysis.

summary to obtain a summary of the results.

plot to draw some useful plots of the results.

Examples

data(isiCollection, package = "bibliometrixData")

data(scopusCollection, package = "bibliometrixData")

M <- mergeDbSources(isiCollection, scopusCollection, remove.duplicated = TRUE)

dim(M)

bibliometrix documentation built on Aug. 29, 2026, 5:10 p.m.