  The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the first
affiliation and the corresponding affiliation at the different levels via the
scientometric analysis We select over 18 million papers in the core collection
database of Web of Science (WoS) published from 2000 to 2015, and measure the
percentage of match between the first and the corresponding affiliation at the
country and institution level. We find that a paper's the first affiliation and
the corresponding affiliation are highly consistent at the country level, with
over 98% of the match on average. However, the match at the institution level
is much lower, which varies significantly with time and country. Hence, for
studies at the country level, using the first and corresponding affiliations
are almost the same. But we may need to take more cautions to select
affiliation when the institution is the focus of the investigation. In the
meanwhile, we find some evidence that the recorded corresponding information in
the WoS database has undergone some changes since 2013, which sheds light on
future studies on the comparison of different databases or the affiliation
accuracy of WoS. Our finding relies on the records of WoS, which may not be
entirely accurate. Given the scale of the analysis, our findings can serve as a
useful reference for further studies when country allocation or institute
allocation is needed. Existing studies on comparisons of straight counting
methods usually cover a limited number of papers, a particular research field
or a limited range of time. More importantly, using the number counted can not
sufficiently tell if the corresponding and first affiliation are similar. This
paper uses a metric similar to Jaccard similarity to measure the percentage of
the match and performs a comprehensive analysis based on a large-scale
bibliometric database.
