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A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases
Arezoo Aghaei Chadegani, Hadi Salehi, Melor Md Yunus, Hadi Farhadi, Masood Fooladi, Maryam Farhadi, Nader Ale Ebrahim
TL;DR
Web of Science and Scopus are widely used but expensive literature databases, and prior studies have not established a universally superior choice. The paper compares their coverage, search and citation capabilities, journal evaluation, costs, and researcher tools, finding different strengths across the two systems and no simple overall winner.
Problem
Libraries and researchers need to choose between expensive Web of Science and Scopus subscriptions, but prior comparisons have not established which database is superior across subjects and analysis periods.
Method
The article compares Web of Science and Scopus across provenance and coverage, searching and result analysis, citation tracking, costs, impact factors, h-index, and researcher-profile tools.
Results
Web of Science has stronger older coverage, whereas Scopus covers more journals but is limited to more recent articles; both support comparable searching and sorting, with differing impact and h-index results across studies.
Takeaways & Limitations
Database preference depends on the subject area, analysis period, and specific features or measures being analyzed, so the comparison does not identify one universal choice.
Takeaways & Limitations
Scopus does not have references before 1996, limiting its historical citation coverage.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Nowadays, the worlds 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.
3 Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Malaysia
The paper identifies the authors’ institutional affiliations and associated research-support units in Malaysia, while also listing the article’s keywords.
- The listed affiliations include the School of Psychology and Human Development at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
- The Research Support Unit at the University of Malaya is also listed among the affiliations.
- The article’s keywords cover database comparison, coverage, searching, citation analysis, impact factor, h-index, researcher profiles, and researcher IDs.
1. Introduction
Web of Science and Scopus are widely used literature databases, but prior comparisons have not established a universally superior option. This article compares their capabilities across coverage, searching, citations, evaluation metrics, costs, and researcher tools.
- Web of Science and Scopus are among the most widespread multidisciplinary databases used for literature searching.
- Prior comparative studies report that the better database depends on the subject area, analysis period, and specific task rather than identifying a clear winner.
- The article compares the databases’ provenance and coverage, search and result-analysis features, citation analysis, costs, impact factors, h-index, and researcher-profile tools.
2. Provenance and Coverage
Web of Science has older and deeper citation coverage, while Scopus contains more journals and records but emphasizes more recent literature. A comparison of Portuguese universities found broader Scopus coverage with substantial overlap and some database-specific records.
- Web of Science includes more than 10,000 journals and bibliographic and citation data reaching back to 1900.
- Scopus covers more than 49 million records, 20,500 peer-reviewed journals, and citation and abstract data reaching back to the 1960s.
- 20% more coverage was reported for Scopus than Web of Science in a comparison of Portuguese university records.
- Two-thirds of the compared records appeared in both databases, while one-third appeared in only one database.
3. Searching and Analysis of Results
Both databases support advanced searching, result refinement, sorting, export, saved searches, alerts, and journal browsing. Their analysis tools differ, with Web of Science offering broader metadata analysis and Scopus offering faceted indexing and a journal analyzer.
- Both databases provide standard, basic, and advanced searches with searchable fields and document-type filters.
- Both databases allow results to be refined by author, source, year, subject area, document type, institution, country, funding agency, and language.
- Both databases sort results by parameters such as first author, citations, and relevance, and support printing, emailing, exporting, saved searches, and alerts.
- Web of Science provides histograms, rankings, cited-reference searching, and related-record tools, while Scopus offers related-document discovery based on authors or keywords.
- Scopus provides faceted indexing and a journal analyzer, whereas Web of Science presents metadata lists using additional categories including language, institutions, and countries.
4. Citation Tracking and Citation Analysis
Web of Science and Scopus both support citation tracking and analysis, but their coverage, citation counts, presentation, and disciplinary agreement differ. Comparative studies generally find correlated rankings rather than a universal winner.
- Citation tracking measures how often a work, author, or journal is cited and can assess individual or institutional impact.
- Web of Science reports citations by document type, author, funding agency, country, organization, language, grant, year, and title, alongside yearly charts and h-index.
- Scopus often reports slightly higher citation counts than Web of Science, although rankings based on citation counts can remain similar.
- Citation-count agreement varies by field: studies report diverse results in medicine but high similarity in chemical engineering.
- Web of Science provides more detailed citation analysis and more understandable graphics, whereas Scopus citation analysis is faster.
5. Forming and Costs
Scopus is presented as easier to follow and more visually accessible than Web of Science, while subscription decisions depend on complex organization-specific costs and performance trade-offs.
- Scopus is easier for beginners to follow than Web of Science and uses contrasting fonts and colors with less visual clutter.
- Scopus is oriented more toward topic searching than Web of Science because its interface is easier to read and less cluttered.
- About $100,000 per year is estimated for Web of Science at large organizations, while Scopus costs about 85-95% as much.
- Choosing between the databases involves trading off cost against performance because pricing depends on organizational factors and negotiated discounts.
- Scopus pricing varies with organization size from $20,000 to $120,000 per year, and paying for both databases is difficult for many organizations.
6. Impact Factors
Web of Science and Scopus differ in how journal impact factors are reported, while studies find that impact-factor rankings are often similar but coverage differences can be substantial.
- Impact factor is calculated from citations to articles published in a journal during a two-year period.
- Web of Science annually publishes indexed journals’ impact factors, whereas Scopus records citation information without reporting indexed-journal impact factors directly.
- Journals indexed in both databases show higher impact factors in Web of Science, while Scopus-only journals show lower values than journals covered by both.
- Differences between Web of Science and Scopus are much smaller for citation counts than for coverage.
- Studies report high similarity, partial differences, or no significant difference in impact-factor rankings depending on the journal field and comparison.
7. Indexing (H-Index)
Web of Science and Scopus use indexing metrics such as the h-index to assess research productivity and influence. Comparisons find similar h-index results for highly cited scientists, while coverage and disciplinary differences affect citation counts.
- The h-index is used to measure researcher productivity and scientific effects, alongside other journal and researcher metrics.
- 18.7 million Scopus records have one or more cited references, representing 42% of the database content.
- For Scopus records published after 1995, the h-index is 1,339, implying at least 1,792,921 total citations.
- For the full Scopus database of 44.5 million records, the h-index is 1,757.
- Web of Science and Scopus produce very close h-index results for highly cited authors, although citation differences vary across disciplines.
8. Researcher Profile and ID Tools
Web of Science and Scopus both support author searching, while their profile-identification tools differ in design and matching capabilities.
- Both databases classify author-name variations using affiliation, subject, and journal information.
- Web of Science’s Distinct Author Set groups papers by analyzing citation data, journals, and subject areas.
- Scopus Author Identifier matches authors using names, affiliations, source titles, subject areas, addresses, and co-authors.
- Web of Science Researcher ID assigns unique identifiers for managing publications, tracking citations and h-index, finding collaborators, and reducing misidentification.
9. Conclusion
The comparison finds complementary strengths rather than a single clear winner: Web of Science offers older, largely English-language coverage, while Scopus indexes more journals but emphasizes newer, lower-impact content.
- Web of Science coverage extends back to 1990, whereas Scopus covers more journals but has lower impact and fewer recent articles.
- Both databases support searching and sorting by parameters such as first author, citation, and institution.
- Prior studies report high association between the databases but differing impact-factor and h-index results.
- The preferred database depends on the subject area, analysis goals, and period examined, so the comparison identifies no universal winner.