Scopus vs.

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Contents
 1 Last Update
 2 Introduction
 3 Scopus
o 3.1 Benefits & weaknesses
 4 Web of Science
 5 Thomson Reuters Impact Factor
o 5.1 WoS - Benefits & weaknesses
 6 Google Scholar
 7 References

Last Update
 4 April 2017

Introduction
See also Altmetrics | Author impact metrics | Google scholar | Impact factors | Research
Portal for Academic Librarians | Scirus | Webometrics

" ...the ThomsonReuters "Web of Science" impact factor (TRIF) is a viable, widely-used and
informative measure of journal visibility and frequency of use..." — Pudovkin & Garfield,
2012
"...between Google scholar and Scopus citations, a combination of the two is recommended
[for citation data] rather than just one of them..." — Kousha et al, 2011
"...Web of Science (WOS), published by Thomson Reuters (TR), is a multidisciplinary
abstracting and indexing (A&I) service with different components to which libraries and
academic institutions can subscribe in combination. Journal indexing is cover-to-cover for
16,959 titles including 726 open access publications... — Goodwin, 2014

Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson Reuter's Web of Science (WoS) are the two most extensive,
popular (and commonly-used) search tools in academia to track impact factors. Besides
searching the literature, these two databases also rank journals re: productivity and total #
of citations to indicate impact, prestige and influence. The principles behind bibliometrics,
and cited reference searching, are used by WoS and Scopus to track impact of authors, their
scholarship, and where they opt to publish.

Scopus and WoS, though complementary, are very different tools in terms of their
coverage/scope and methods. If researchers or librarians were asked to select one, which do
they prefer? To answer this, the two databases should be compared head to head for
qualitative and quantitative aspects. Both tools make use of bibliometrics but each has unique
features, coverage and practices to arrive at citation counts and impact. Scopus ultimately
has more content (~18-22,000 journals) but has an obvious bias in its coverage of European
journals Elsevier titles. WoS covers about ~12,000 journals (open access titles and
conference abstracts) but reveals its own American bias. Academic libraries provide access
to either Scopus or WoS, and sometimes both but this is rare.

In further detail, WoS is a multidisciplinary database that contains the Science Citation
Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Scopus provides
access to scientific, technical, medical and social science literature. While several databases
such as EBSCO offer a kind of internal cited reference searching their coverage is not as
comprehensive as the WoS. In fact, it can be said with some certainty that no single tool is
able to track all citations and the research citing them. The databases that offer cited
reference searching often focus on academic journals that they index and neglect papers in
the deep web (see grey literature). As a result, some important seminal articles and
monographs are always missed.

Dr. Peter Jacso criticizes the claims of those who use Scopus, WoS and Google scholar
pointing out that " ...knowing the bibliometric features of databases, their own h-index and
related metrics versus those of the alternative tools can be very useful for computing a
variety of research performance indicators. However, we need to learn much more about our
tools in our rush to metricise everything before we can rest assured that our gauges gauge
correctly or at least with transparent limitations...". In light of the ubiquity of new author
impact metrics, his statements have a resounding ring of truth to them. In other words:
librarians beware!
Scopus

Subject coverage in Scopus

Scopus indexes 53 million records, 21,915 titles and content from 5,000 publishers, and
claims to be the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web
sources. This claim is challenged by researchers in various fields including in library science
(Jacso, 2011). See this breakdown of Scopus content. Elsevier is the owner of Scopus and is
also one of the main international publishers of scientific journals.

 Scopus contains 53 million records, 70% with abstracts

 Scopus has added over 160 million cited references to its database, dating back to
1970.
 Nearly 22,000 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide
 4.9 million conference proceedings, and more than 4150 Open Access journals
 100% Medline coverage

 20+ million records back to 1996 with references

 20+ million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1823

 40,000 monographs or books

 386 million scientific web pages
 22 million patent records from 5 patent offices
 Links to full-text & other library resources
 Innovative tools to review results and refine to relevant hits
 Alerts to keep you up-to-date on new articles matching your search query, or by
favorite authors
 With Scopus you can construct long-term, extensive bibliometric and historic trend
analyses, and more complete author profiles and h-index measurements for
individuals who began publishing prior to 1996.

Sciverse Scopus covers 250 million quality web sources, including 22 million patents.
Searches in Scopus incorporate searches of scientific web pages through Scirus, and include
author homepages, university sites and resources such as preprint servers and OAI compliant
resources.

 In 2014, Scopus announced a new journal metric called Impact per Publication (IPP).
IPP measures the ratio of citations per article published, and provides an additional
metric for comparing and evaluating journals. Access the IPP metric from the
"Compare journals" tool in Scopus.
 Scopus - more detail on what it does and its coverage & complete coverage guide

Benefits & weaknesses

 Scopus permits search by affiliation; by zip code and institutional name(s).

 Scopus covers over 22,000 journals, versus 11,000 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 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;
o default, refine, format of results of citation tracker and author identification
 Scopus covers mostly scientific fields; relatively weak in sociology, physics and
astronomy

Web of Science

Subject coverage in WoS

Thomson Reuter's Web of Science (WoS) (formerly Web of Knowledge) 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.

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

 Covers 12,311+ journals from 256 categories, 110,000 proceedings from

conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia worldwide

 1300 Open Access journals are covered

 Journal backfiles to 1900, cover-to-cover indexing, cited reference and chemical

structure searches
 Science – 7100 international journals and highly cited book series in 170 categories
back to 1900
 Social Sciences – 1,750 international journals and highly cited book series in 50
subject categories back to 1954
 Arts & Humanities – 1,200 international journals and highly cited book series in 25
categories 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.
 Web of Science tutorial
 WoS - detail on coverage
 See also Essential Science Indicators (and ESI specifics to determine the
influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in their
field of study — as well as emerging research areas that could impact their
work

Thomson Reuters Impact Factor

JCR provides quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing
journals. The impact factor is one of these; it is a measure of the frequency with which the
"average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The annual JCR
impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. Thus, the impact
factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source
items published in that journal during the previous two years.

 A = total cites in 2010

 B = 2010 cites to articles published in 2008-9 (a subset of A)
 C = number of articles published in 2008-9
 D = B/C = 2010 impact factor

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 although many counts are inflated.