A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of
Science and Scopus Databases
* Corresponding author
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.
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 :
Document type :
Journal articles
Asian Social Science, 2013, 9 (5), pp.18-26. <10.5539/ass.v9n5p18>
Domain :
A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases