TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: Response to the comparative review of Web of Science and Scopus: A Comparative Review of Content and
Date: September 2009
Organization: American University of Beirut
Letter:
Letter to the Editor
Response to the comparative review of Web of Science and Scopus: A Comparative Review of Content and Searching Capabilities, Volume 11, Issue 1, July 2009 pp. 5-18(14).
Dear Editor,
I have read the review: "Web of Science and Scopus: A Comparative Review of Content and Searching Capabilities" in the July issue of The Charleston Advisor. I wish to highlight two areas in which I feel the review paints a misleading and inaccurate picture of the content in both databases.
The first point relates to the selection of the reviewed journals. Admittedly, choosing +100 journals as a representative sample to analyse the coverage of a whole database is a difficult task. However, by focussing only on top titles in the various subject fields, this review does not take into account a broader understanding of the journal landscape, e.g. by including publications of more regional importance. As a result the review fails to capture the fact that of the 18,000 journals indexed by Scopus only 11,500 are also covered by Web of Science (WoS).
The second point I would like to address concerns the author's selection of document types that have been included in the review. The document counts in this review are not based - as incorrectly stated in the review - on the core document type "article" (including review articles and conference articles), but also include meeting abstracts, book reviews, and other document types that are intentionally not selected (or rarely selected) by Scopus. This, consequently, resulted in the inflation of figures for Web of Science, as illustrated in the following examples.
- For the Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology (page 7), the reviewer states that Web of Science covers 5,649 articles between 1996 and 2008 and Scopus only 626. The reality is that 5,007 of the Web of Science records are meeting abstracts (i.e., not peer-reviewed articles, as suggested by the review), and belong to a document type not selected by Scopus because standard bibliometric practices do not consider them as final or original contributions. Another similar example is the journal Developmental Biology (page 11).
- For the journal American Biology Teacher (page 7), the reviewer states that Web of Science covers 1,497 articles between 1996 and 2008 and Scopus only 1,077. The reality is that only 834 (56%) of the Web of Science records are "article" and "review article" items. In the case of Scopus, 910 (84%) are articles and review articles. Other similar examples include the American Journal of Sociology, The American Statistician, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, College Composition and Communication, College English, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Economic Geography, Ethics, Family Relations, The Geographical Journal, Geographical Review, The Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Marriage and the Family, The Modern Language Journal, Mountain Research and Development, Nous, The Philosophical Quarterly, and Social Forces. The number of retrieved items for all of these journals is significantly inflated in Web of Science mainly because of the book reviews indexed.
As a result of this distorted comparison, the review suggests that coverage in Scopus appears to be incomplete. In my view, non-core documents, especially meeting abstracts, book reviews, software reviews, and letters to the editor should not be included and a sound comparison should be limited to peer-reviewed documents. It should be noted, too, that even for core documents, each database uses different practices in referring to an article or a review article.
Kind Regards,
Lokman I. Meho
University Librarian
American University of Beirut
