The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis

By Philippe Mongeon, Adèle Paul-Hus. Scientometrics, 2015

4,422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus. The objective of this research is to describe the journal coverage of those two databases and to assess whether some field, publishing country and language are over or underrepresented. To do this we compared the coverage of active scholarly journals in WoS (13,605 journals) and Scopus (20,346 journals) with Ulrich’s extensive periodical directory (63,013 journals). Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduce biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detriment of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Similarly, English-language journals are overrepresented to the detriment of other languages. While both databases share these biases, their coverage differs substantially. As a consequence, the results of bibliometric analyses may vary depending on the database used. These results imply that in the context of comparative research evaluation, WoS and Scopus should be used with caution, especially when comparing different fields, institutions, countries or languages. The bibliometric community should continue its efforts to develop methods and indicators that include scientific output that are not covered in WoS or Scopus, such as field-specific and national citation indexes.

Subfields: Information Systems, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/362f50f59a280d7cc526fb626fdf44ad382cee57

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Citations in the corpus

Drivers, barriers and social considerations for AI adoption in business and management: A tertiary study (2020, neutral): “The UHOL performs a search over 278 different library databases, including Scopus which has the widest coverage of peer-reviewed journals [20].”
Worldwide Research on Plant Defense against Biotic Stresses as Improvement for Sustainable Agriculture (2018, methodology): “The Scopus database has been selected to carry out this project since a comparative analysis between Scopus and Web of Science showed that the journal coverage is higher in Scopus than in WoS [44].”
Science Mapping of the Knowledge Base on Sustainable Leadership, 1990–2018 (2018, methodology): “This review employed the Scopus index which is widely used to generate databases for systematic reviews of research [34,71].”
Where you search determines what you find: the effects of bibliographic databases on systematic reviews (2021, positive): “Such a convenience-led choice is even more likely if researchers lack a clear understanding of what different databases have to offer and what their limits are (e.g., Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2016).”
The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles (2018, neutral): “Another is that researchers in the scientometrics and OA fields have largely relied on other indexes, particularly Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), to represent the literature as a whole; this makes our results more difficult to compare to previous work.”
Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today's Academic World (2021, methodology): “The same can be said about the use of WoS and Scopus data in Social Sciences & Humanities, since these disciplines are clearly underrepresented in the DBs [5,44,47,88,91,163,263].”
Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. A Bibliometric Analysis of Their Interrelations (2021, background): “The main databases closely linked to the area of knowledge have been consulted [49,83], while the research works from Scopus have been selected, as they have a high number of papers, authors, and journals while meeting the peer-review requirement for scientific quality.”
Soil erosion modelling: A global review and statistical analysis (2020, neutral): “…to use Scopus in this analysis was based on the information available in the literature, indicating that Scopus may have a greater coverage of speci ﬁ c subjects in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and a larger match with compared to WoF (Barnett and Lascar, 2012; Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016).”
AI Literacy: Definition, Teaching, Evaluation and Ethical Issues (2021, background): “18 Even though transparency in algorithms and AI in general has been acknowledged to be ethically important, the public lacks understanding of even the basic functions of AI. Efforts to make AI more comprehensible exist (Robinson, 2020). Lee et al. (2021); Kandlhofer et al.”