New Database: Scopus: Comparison between Web of Science and Scopus

Number of journals

21,950
(22,800 if include trade pubs)

13,100
(20,556 if include ESCI)

Proceedings

8 million

10.5 million

Focus

Physical sciences, health sciences, life sciences, social sciences & humanities

Science, technology, social sciences, arts and humanities

Period Covered

1970 to present

1945-present; if Century of Science purchased, coverage back to1900

Non-English

Yes, if has an English abstract; 22% of journals are non-English

Yes, if has an English abstract

# Published outside North America

16,000

14,420
(20,420 if include ESCI)

Interdisciplinary field coverage

Strength

Weakness

Updated

Daily

Daily

Developer/Producer

Elsevier

Clarivate Analytics

Citation Analysis

Yes

Yes

Mark Records

Yes

Yes

Export Records

Yes - en masse

Yes - en masse

Alerts Service

Yes

Yes

Author Profiles

Yes

Yes

Strengths

• Visually stunning author and citation reports
• International and specialized disciplinary coverage
• Includes Altmetrics when available (on abstract page)
• Includes in-press articles

• Covers only "journals of influence"
• Coverage back to 1900
• Organization name unification
• Publisher neutral (they are an info provider, not a publisher)

Weaknesses

• Early reports pointed out weak in social sciences and humanities
• Studies show still weak in sociology and physics/astronomy
• Typographical errors in records

• Covers only "journals of influence"
• Difficulty searching unusual author name formats: hyphenated, compound names, umlauts, etc.
• Punctuation issues - e.g., ampersands in journal titles.