Web of Science vs Scopus

[D.T.Edwin]

Dear Friends,

Anyone did a study on Web of Science vz Scopus? Which one is better as per your experience and why?

Regards

Edwin

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Sir D.T. Edwin,

Thanks for your post.

There are a couple of published articles on comparisons of Web of Science & Scopus.

I am attaching one article written by a team of Malaysian & Iranese Researchers in Asian Social Science in 2013.

I have collected it from ResearchGate when it appeared. This is a good article as the authors did a comprehensive literature Survey but personally speaking, an article by Viera & Gomes published in Scientometrics in the year 2009  seems more preferable to me.  Unfortunately, I don't have any soft copy of that article (I have a print copy only). You will find its reference in the attached article. As per my personal opinion, the WOS or actually its predecessor SCI/SSCI/AHCI of ISI press(of Late Dr. Eugene Garfield) had been quite choosy in selecting journals. Some section accuse it of being proUS! As a Scientometics enthusiast for last three & half decades (and an avid fan of Dr. Garfield) I have a modest collection of articles on Citation Indexing and Research Analysis in the form of reprints of articles which includes the first article on the genesis of Science Citation Index by Eugene Garfield published in Science in 1954.  The Scopus is relatively new (started from 2004) and probably stemmed from Elsevier's ADONIS database of 1991 (presumably the first ever clustered full text journals of Elsevier published in CDs in weekly frequency.) Presently it has coverage of nearly 25000 items which is more than double than that of WOS. The attached article describes the nature & geographical coverage and the list in the reference is a very useful and handy resource.

hope you will enjoy reading.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta