Web of Science vs. Scopus

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Gavel (2008) Journal overlap study
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Contents

Introduction

See also Bibliometrics, Google scholar & Research for librarians - portal

The Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus (Elsevier) are two tools viewed as similar in the tracking down of academic papers and impact factors - and yet, the two databases have rather different approaches to tracking academic scholarship especially in terms of scope.

While both WoS and Scopus employ the principles of bibliometrics, each has unique features and content. In terms of coverage, Scopus has 1/3 more content (18,000 journals) and an obvious European (Elsevier) bias. WoS covers about ~12,000 interdisciplinary journals with an American bias. Many academic libraries provide either Scopus or WoS though some libraries subscribe to both. Scholars and researchers are required to find articles that cite their papers, chapters in books or monographs.

Bibliometrics - also cited reference searching - allows the tracking of major authors' impact in specified fields. Bibliometrics is a kind of quantitative method of impact of scholars in their chosen field - and a kind of ego-surfing. One of the best sources for this type of searching is Scientific Thomson's Web of Science (WoS) which requires a subscription. WoS is a multidisciplinary database that contains the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Another proprietary tool for cited reference searching is Scopus (Elsevier). Developed by Elsevier, it provides cited ref searching for scientific, technical, medical and social sciences literature. A number of EBSCO databases offer cited reference searching but their coverage will not be as comprehensive as the WoS. No single tool tracks all occurrences of every citation. Databases that offer cited reference searching often focus on academic journals and those in the deep web (see grey literature). As a result, some important seminal articles and monographs may not be included.

Web of Science

Scientific Thomson's Web of Science (WoS) provides access to a network of scholarly articles linked by their references. Articles have been indexed from journals since 1960 and 12,000 journals are currently covered. WoS is the online version of the Science Citation Index with some differences. Separate annual editions covering science, social sciences, and the arts and humanities have been integrated into a multiyear multidisciplinary system. WoS covers nearly 23 million source papers from the 1940s to the present, and frequently updated.

see 2011 Tutorials, 8-minute webinar with downloadable slides & Summary of new features & training links

Summary: Web of Science is updated with approximately 25,000 articles and 700,000 cited references added each week.

  • Science – covering over 6,200 international journals and highly cited book series in over 170 subject categories – available back to 1900
  • Social Sciences – covering over 1,750 international journals and highly cited book series in 50 subject categories – available back to 1954
  • Arts & Humanities – covering approximately 1,158 international journals and highly cited book series in over 25 subject categories – available back to 1975
  • Complete backfiles to 1945 however put total at ~37 million records
  • Cited reference and chemical structure searches
  • Author identification tools
  • Analysis capabilities
  • Direct links to your full-text collections
  • Index Chemicus®: Over 2.6 million compounds, to 1993.
  • Current Chemical Reactions®: Over one million reactions, to 1986, plus INPI archives from 1840 to 1985.

WoS provides unique search methods and cited searching. Users can navigate forward and backward through the literature, and search all disciplines and time periods. Users can navigate to print and electronic collections using institutional linkresolvers.

Web of Science (WoS) is searchable with complete bibliographic data, cited reference data and navigation and links to full text.

WoS - Benefits & weaknesses

  • Only a slight difference in coverage between Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) and a strong overlap.
  • WoS covers science and arts/humanities.
  • WoS search interface is improving but not as useful as Scopus.
  • WoS has more options for citation analysis for institutions.
  • Substantial differences exist between WoS, Scopus and Google scholar - the latter delivers instant results for searchers. This can (subconsciously) be a major reason for users to choose it over other tools.
  • Google scholar is much larger than either WoS or Scopus but it has been shown to have fewer references to selected articles. However, GS' unique coverage and web crawling techniques means that it has been shown to have five (5) times as many unique cited items.

Scopus

Elsevier's Scopus claims to be the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources.

  • Scopus has ~38 million records
  • ~18,000 titles from 5,000 international publishers
  • Coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals including 1,200 Open Access journals
  • 600 trade publications, 350 book series, extensive conference coverage (3,6 million conference papers)
  • 38 million records, of which:
  • 19 million records back to 1996 with references
  • 19 million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1869
  • Results from 386 million scientific web pages
  • 22 million patent records from 5 patent offices
  • Seamless links to full-text articles and other library resources
  • Innovative tools that review search results and refine to most relevant hits
  • Alerts to keep you up-to-date on new articles matching your search query, or by favorite author

Elsevier's Scopus covers 250 million quality web sources, including 22 million patents. Web sources are searched via Scirus, and include author homepages, university sites and resources such as preprint servers and OAI compliant resources.

Scopus - Benefits & weaknesses

  • Scopus permits search by affiliation; by zip code and institutional name(s).
  • Scopus covers over 15,000 journals, versus 10,000 in WoS.
  • Scopus is 5-15% smaller prior to 1996, and 20-45% larger than WoS after 1996. For publications before 1996, the coverage offered by Scopus for the various subjects is uneven.
  • 95% of Scopus' database consists of records of descriptions of articles.
  • Before 1996, the number of non-journal articles in Scopus is low; this rises to about 10% by 2005.
  • For recent years, the proportion of non-journal articles is significantly higher in Scopus than in WoS (4%).
  • Scopus is a more versatile search tool; clear advantages in functionality;
    • default, refine, format of results of citation tracker and author identification.
  • Scopus covers mostly scientific fields; relatively weak in sociology, physics and astronomy.

Google scholar

See also Google scholar bibliography

Google scholar is easy-to-search, provides quick entry into the grey literature and access to cited papers. Jacso says that GS' poor quality control and inflated citation counts however makes it less than optimum. A number of Impact factors - such as the h-index - are now determined by using Google scholar data despite its many flaws and limitations. Although Google scholar provides access to other papers through its cited by feature it is generally seen to be a browsing tool and not a proper bibliometric tool like Wos or Scopus. Bibliometric searcing requires a proper database that employes cited reference search features. Finding occurrences of authors and journal articles in footnotes and bibliographies in print or digital form is the main purpose of these tools.

References
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