A study of citations to STEM databases: ACM Digital Library, Engineering Village, IEEE Xplore, and MathSciNet

Databases are the discovery mechanisms used for searching and browsing scholarly information. Citings to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) databases used by computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians were analyzed for coverage and impact in the literature. This study uses the Web of Science (WoS) database to conduct a cited reference search to ACM Digital Library, Engineering Village, IEEE Xplore , and MathSciNet. The respective citation counts were compared by document types, publication year, language, country, organization, WoS category, and source title. The resulting low citation counts and lack of reference formatting agreement to these databases were in line with the predicted hypothesis. The impact of STEM databases in citations appears to be undercounted since they are not often included in citations. This article is intended to spark debate on the practice of citing databases in scholarly publications.