TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: Response to Dr. Lokman I. Meho letter to the editor regarding Web of Science and Scopus
Date: November 2009
Organization: University of Arkansas Libraries
Letter:
Response to Dr. Lokman I. Meho letter to the editor regarding Web of Science and Scopus: A Comparative Review of Content and Searching Capabilities, Volume 11,
Issue 1, July 2009 pp. 5-18(14).
With regard to the first point on the selection of journals chosen for the comparison, my selection of titles was not limited to the top journals in any field. I selected the 110 titles just because they were easily available in the packages, and in the case of Nature, Science and PNAS because they are general interest science periodicals.
While not explicitly stated, the extent of coverage of the databases is well documented in the first two paragraphs of the paper. Someone interested in this can verify the differences in coverage and may "identify 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 selection of document types that have been included in the review. Dr. Meho points out that for the "Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology 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 The reality is that 5,007 of the Web of Science records are meeting abstracts (i.e., not peer-reviewed articles, as suggested by the review), and belong to a document type not selected by Scopus because standard bibliometric practices do not consider them as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" and ... "the number of retrieved items for all of these journals is significantly inflated in Web of Science mainly because of the book reviews indexed."
First, nowhere in the paper is it mentioned that the coverage of articles was limited to peer-review articles. It is a fact that Web of Science indexes its journals cover-to-cover, and therefore all types of material are included and each one can be counted as a record. Perhaps I should have used the word "records" rather than "articles." However, in my experience as a seasoned librarian, materials like conference abstracts and letters to the editors are useful research material, whether or not "standard bibliometric practices" consider them final or original contributions. In many instances, informative conference abstracts provide information on what has been done, how it was done and what the results and conclusions are in the nutshell. Since most times scholarship extends or builds on the work of others, finding an abstract can be enough information to start the communication process or to discover that someone else is working on a particular topic. In many cases, an abstract may be the only source of information to inform a researcher that a particular research may have already been done or a particular method is being used in a research project. Just last week, I had a research group who found an abstract in WOS that they were eagerly trying to find out more about since that was the same area one of the graduate students had undertaken as his major research project. This abstract was also cited two times in the WOS. The outcome was the knowledge that this paper was not published elsewhere as yet. The researcher was able to track down the author based on this information to discuss his research findings.
Letters to the editors and addenda can also be extremely useful research material. As an example of their usefulness, I can refer to a question that I had in my library very recently. After repeating an experiment that was reported in a paper, a professor found several errors in calculation. She wanted to find out whether these errors had been corrected or identified in a letter to the editor, or if the author had corrected it by publishing an addendum to the paper. Because letters to the editor, addenda, etc., are covered in WOS, the researcher was able to use this and the discipline database to do a comprehensive search for this information before proceeding to write her own review of it.
Book reviews are also useful source for information that undergraduate use especially in social sciences and the humanities. In fact, at my institution, entire classes are given assignments to review specific books that are discipline-specific. It is no doubt that book reviews written by professionals in the field offer the students a more in-depth view of analysis of a book so students turn to databases to find these book reviews as examples. This information is lacking in the Scopus database.
As we all know, libraries pay exorbitant subscription costs to accesses both of these databases, so it is important that we continue to use them to provide the cover-to-cover information they offer about important research materials for our users in a timely manner.
Lutishoor Salisbury
University Professor/Librarian
University of Arkansas Libraries
lsalisbu@uark.edu
November 9, 2009
