A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases

Abstract

Nowadays, the world's scientific community has been publishing an enormous number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to answer frequent questions which researchers ask, such as: How Web of Science and Scopus are different? In which aspects these two databases are similar? Or, if the researchers are forced to choose one of them, which one should they prefer? For answering these questions, these two databases will be compared based on their qualitative and quantitative characteristics.

What we know and do not know about organizational resilience

“…We considered four databases: IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Scopus and Web of Science. Scopus includes both IEEE and ScienceDirect papers, and Scopus has a larger coverage than Web of Science, though it does not cover some journals (Chadegani et al, 2013). Additionally, it provides more search filters.…”

Periódicos científicos das Ciências Agrárias: análise dos títulos brasileiros indexados na Web of Science e Scopus

“…O ponto de partida para a escolha das revistas se deu pela identificação dos títulos que estavam indexados nas bases de dados WoS e Scopus. Essas bases possuem significativa amplitude de periódicos e são consideradas as mais rigorosas na seleção dos títulos, além de indexar as revistas acadêmicas, oferecem recursos bibliométricos para classificar as revistas em termos de produtividade e total de citações recebidas para indicar o impacto das revistas (CHADEGANI et al, 2013). Sendo que se pode considerar que todos os títulos indexados por elas possuem qualidade reconhecida internacionalmente.…”

Publishing Research Support Documents in Open Access Platform to Improve Research Impact

“…SciVal enables visualization of Elsevier's SCOPUS data for the chosen search terms "Visibility" and "Citations". Being the largest abstract and reference database, SCOPUS provides citation dataset of research literature and quality web sources [7]. Figure 1 shows the publications trend on research visibility and citations impact from 1996 to date (19 June 2017).…”