Comparing Bibliometric Statistics Obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus

By Éric Archambault, David Campbell, Yves Gingras, Vincent Larivière. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2009

794 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large-scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of statistics obtained from different data sources. This paper uses macro-level bibliometric indicators to compare results obtained from the WoS and Scopus. It shows that the correlations between the measures obtained with both databases for the number of papers and the number of citations received by countries, as well as for their ranks, are extremely high (R2 > .99). There is also a very high correlation when countries' papers are broken down by field. The paper thus provides evidence that indicators of scientific production and citations at the country level are stable and largely independent of the database.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eb63ae53dcae5fb6c51df3616b427f50494bbe8

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Citations in the corpus

Large-scale analysis of the accuracy of the journal classification systems of Web of Science and Scopus (2015, neutral): “… is the accuracy of the databases when used to assess research output and impact at different levels, ranging from individual researchers to 4 departments, institutes, and countries (e.g., Archambault et al., 2009; Bar-‐Ilan et al., 2007;…”
The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis (2015, methodology): “The results of this study show that, as Archambault et al. (2006) had found, there is still an overrepresentation of certain countries and languages to the detriment of others in the WoS journal coverage.”
The globalization of social sciences? Evidence from a quantitative analysis of 30 years of production, collaboration and citations in the social sciences (1980–2009) (2014, background): “More precisely, the following specific disciplines are included in our definition of ‘social sciences’ when using the Thomson database: ‘area studies’, ‘anthropology and archeology’, ‘criminology’, ‘demography’, ‘economics’, ‘science studies’, ‘geography’, ‘planning and urban studies’, ‘internationa”
A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, background): “The difficulties caused by the national and regional orientation of SSH research are emphasized by Archambault et al. (2006). They claim that WoS has a 20 to 25%”