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

Arezoo Aghaei Chadegani, Hadi Salehi, Melor Md Yunus, Hadi Farhadi, Masood Fooladi, Maryam Farhadi () and Nader Ale Ebrahim

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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.

Keywords: web of science; scopus; database; citations; provenance; coverage; searching; citation tracking; impact factor; indexing; h-index; researcher profile; researcher ID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 I2 I23 O1 O10 Z0 Z00 Z1 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02-11, Revised 2013-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (166)

Published in Asian Social Science 5.9(2013): pp. 18-26

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