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

Aghaei Chadegani Arezoo (1) , Hadi Salehi (2) , Melor Md Yunus (3) , Hadi Farhadi (3) , Masood Fooladi (4) , Maryam Farhadi (1) , Nader Ale Ebrahim (5)

1 IAU, Mobarakeh - Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh
2 IAUN - Islamic Azad University, Najafabad branch
3 UKM - Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
4 IAU, Mobarakeh - Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh
5 UM - University of Malaya = Universiti Malaya [Kuala Lumpur, Malaisie]

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.

Mots clés: web of science; scopus; database; citations; provenance; coverage; searching; citation tracking; impact factor; indexing; h-index; researcher profile; researcher ID

Domaines: Base de données [cs.DB]; Sciences de l'environnement; Education

Aghaei Chadegani Arezoo, Hadi Salehi, Melor Md Yunus, Hadi Farhadi, Masood Fooladi, et al.. A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases. Asian Social Science, 2013, 9 (5), pp.18-26. ⟨10.5539/ass.v9n5p18⟩. ⟨hal-00819821⟩