Web of Science vs. Scopus

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Contents

Introduction

See also Bibliometrics and Google scholar

Although Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus (Elsevier) are viewed as similar tools in tracking academic papers and impact factors - the two databases are quite different. While WoS and Scopus use principles of bibliometrics, each has unique features and content. In terms of coverage, Scopus has 1/3 more content internationally (18,000 journals) but it has a Eurocentric (Elsevier) bias; WoS covers about ~10,000 interdisciplinary journals and an American bias. Many academic libraries have access to either Scopus or WoS although a few 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 - is a way to track interest in the work of major authors in a specified field. It may be viewed as a quantitative method of impact of scholars in their chosen field - and even a kind of ego-surfing. One of the best sources for this type of searching is Scientific Thomson's Web of Science (WoS). As a proprietary tool it requires a subscription to access; 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 seamless access to current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from:

  • 850,000 fully indexed journal articles have been added to WoS; some records back to early 20th century
  • ~10,000 journals from ~265 multidisciplinary categories; cover-to-cover indexing.
  • ~19 million citations in total
  • 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
  • 19 million records include references going back to 1996 (78% include references)
  • 17 million pre-1996 records go back to 1841
  • 18,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers
    • over 1200 Open Access journals
    • 500 conference proceedings
    • over 600 trade publications
    • 200 book series
  • 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 and provides quick entry into the grey literature. It also provides easy access to cited papers though Jacso has written about GS' poor quality control and inflated citation counts. 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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