Stata commands for importing bibliometric data and processing author address information

Given the recent trend in bibliometrics and information science to use increasingly complex statistical methods, it is necessary to have powerful toolboxes to work with data from Web of Science (Thomson Reuters). We developed such a toolbox with four specific commands for the statistical software package Stata. These commands refer to (1) the import of downloads from Web of Science to Stata, (2) the preprocessing of address information from authors of publications in the downloaded set, (3) the geocoding of address information, and (4) the calculation of the minimum and maximum distance between several co-authors of a single paper. An advantage of developing commands for an established and comprehensive statistical software package (like Stata) is that a large number of further commands are available for the analysis of bibliometric data. We will describe some of these useful commands as well.