Research Trends: Benefits & Weaknesses

Benefits & Weaknesses

• Only a slight difference in coverage between Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) and a strong overlap.

• WoS covers science and arts/humanities.

• WoS search interface is improving but not as useful as Scopus.

• WoS has more options for citation analysis for institutions.

• Substantial differences exist between WoS, Scopus and Google scholar - the latter delivers instant results for searchers. This can (subconsciously) be a major reason for users to choose it over other tools.

• Google scholar is much larger than either WoS or Scopus but it has been shown to have fewer references to selected articles. However, GS' unique coverage and web crawling techniques means that it has been shown to have five (5) times as many unique cited items although many counts are inflated.

Benefits & Weaknesses

• Scopus permits search by affiliation; by zip code and institutional name(s).

• Scopus covers over 22,000 journals, versus 11,000 in WoS

• Scopus is 5-15% smaller prior to 1996, and 20-45% larger than WoS after 1996

• For publications before 1996, the coverage offered by Scopus for the various subjects is uneven

• 95% of Scopus' database consists of records of descriptions of articles.

• Before 1996, the number of non-journal articles in Scopus is low; this rises to 10% by 2005

• For recent years, the proportion of non-journal articles is significantly higher in Scopus than in WoS (4%)

• Scopus is a more versatile search tool; clear advantages in functionality; default, refine, format of results of citation tracker and author identification

• Scopus covers mostly scientific fields; relatively weak in sociology, physics and astronomy