Angewandte Chemie articles are doubly indexed

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Gabor Schubert

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Apr 3, 2025, 6:03:46 AMApr 3

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Hi,

I noticed that tens of thousands of articles from Angewandte Chemie and Angewandte Chemie International Edition are indexed twice as separate publications in OpenAlex. Unfortunately, this Wiley journal has a weird practice that for historical reasons many articles are published twice with two different DOIs: one DOI for the "German" version and one for the "International". This practice caused problems already several decades ago before the implementation of DOIs, and the effect of this was analysed in several scholarly articles previously (see for example: Moed HF et al.: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02093487 and Marx W: https://doi.org/10.1002/1521-3773(20010105)40:1%3C139::AID-ANIE139%3E3.0.CO;2-4).

In OpenAlex there are more than 130 000 articles are indexed from Angewandte Chemie (https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.id%3As4210200754) and more than 90 000 from Angewandte Chemie International Edition (https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=primary_location.source.id%3As67393510). I found that there is an overlap of more than 40 000 article pairs in OpenAlex which have the exact same English title, but they are indexed as two different articles with two different DOIs. And the citations to these are counted separately. I attached a csv file with the pairs I found.

For example, the 2024 article titled "Recent Progress in Using Covalent Organic Frameworks to Stabilize Metal Anodes for Highly‐Efficient Rechargeable Batteries" has a "German" version in Angewandte Chemie (https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.202406511) with the following notice on the homepage: "This is the German version of Angewandte Chemie. Note for articles published since 1962: Do not cite this version alone. Take me to the International Edition version with citable page numbers, DOI, and citation export. We apologize for the inconvenience.". This version has received 8 citations according to OpenAlex: https://openalex.org/works/w4396706354. The "International" version has a separate DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202406511, and was cited by 37 publications according to OpenAlex: https://openalex.org/works/w4396687134. Which is even more disturbing that in this case the "German" version of this article is in English, and it is the exact copy of the International version.

There are older articles which were actually translated to English from German (or vice-versa), which might somehow explain this duality, but there could be large discrepancies in citation counts if one counts both or only one of them. See for example: https://openalex.org/w2782472391 (https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.201711060) and https://openalex.org/w2793967588 (https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201711060), where the German version has 320 citations and the International version has 1252 citations.

Other "side-effect" of this double documentation, that when one looks at institutional statistics many Angewandte Chemie articles counted twice in OpenAlex. For example, the German Max Planck Society has ca. 4000 articles in Angewandte Chemie and more than 3000 in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, but many of these are most probably the same articles indexed with double DOIs. (https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=authorships.institutions.lineage%3Ai149899117,type%3Atypes%2Farticle,primary_location.source.id%3As67393510&group_by=publication_year,open_access.is_oa,primary_topic.id,authorships.institutions.lineage,type,primary_location.source.id&sort=display_name and https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=authorships.institutions.lineage%3Ai149899117,type%3Atypes%2Farticle,primary_location.source.id%3As4210200754&group_by=publication_year,open_access.is_oa,primary_topic.id,authorships.institutions.lineage,type,primary_location.source.id&sort=display_name)

As far as I see other publication databases like Web of Science or Scopus only indexes the Angewandte Chemie International Edition and they are merging the citations to that version. Web of Science has some older articles (pre 1960) indexed from the German version.