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 ⁴ Masood Fooladi ⁵ Maryam Farhadi ¹ Nader Ale Ebrahim ⁶

* Corresponding author

1 IAU, Mobarakeh - Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh

2 IAU, Najafabad - Islamic Azad University, Najafabad

3 UKM - Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

4 UKM - Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

5 IAU, Mobarakeh - Islamic Azad University, Mobarakeh

6 UM - University of Malaya

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 :

Document type :

Journal articles

Asian Social Science, 2013, 9 (5), pp.18-26. <10.5539/ass.v9n5p18>

Domain :

Computer Science / Databases

Environmental Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences / Education

 




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