Web of Science or SCOPUS? which one you like most?

[Newbies_Kid]

Hi, i guess some of us here are student or maybe academicians.. so if you are, please feel free to share your thought.

[timo]

Unless you really want an "X vs. Y" thread, I think you should also state what these webpages (that I both do not know) are supposed to be for. I have the feeling that my reply would be "I use Google Scholar", but that is just from blindly assuming you speak about finding publications and citations.

[hypervalent_iodine]

I have not used SCOPUS and I have not ever used WOS for anything except chemistry, biology and once, psychology, making my opinion rather limited. That being said, I do actually quite like web of science as a back up search engine. During my undergrad, I used it quite heavily. It is quite often able to locate certain papers that my university library and Google scholar, etc. cannot find, which is a definitely handy. It is better than Google scholar in some respects, since you can sort your results by year, citations and relevance (among others). As well, I find filtering through multiple authors, journals, publication years, etc. is much easier and straight-forward with WOS than with Google scholar.

 

I do, however, have some slight problems with it. My primary issue with WOS is that when you are searching topics, it doesn't have the capacity to compensate for minor spelling errors or alternate ways of spelling words (you dastardly Americans and your persistent use of the letter, 'z', is always messing with my WOS searches). Even more annoying for me as an organic chemist is that it doesn't like characters of any kind, at all, ever; I have to systematically go though each title I want to look up, remove all the Greek symbols, hyphens, commas, apostrophes, etc.

 

Really, you are better off using combinations of as many search engines as you can be bothered with and that you trust. If I'm doing in-depth research for something, I tend to use WOS, SciFinder and Google scholar, rather than one or the other. You get a much more comprehensive bank of papers that way.

[Newbies_Kid]

Timo: Your guess is right! But i don't ever use Google Scholar before.

 

h_i: Yes, WoS is more complicated compared to SCOPUS but SCOPUS had many non-english articles. I'm from Malaysia and it was really hard to find articles written in my language in WoS. Yes, i agree that we should better use both than pick only one. But the problem is, when i write a paper, people always ask which database i'm using. It hard to explain why i'm using this and why i'm not using that because i don't even know which one is better.

[UltimateBioGeek]

I routinely use Scopus, although I haven't used WOS all that much. My main issue with Scopus is limited access to certain journals that are not in a foreign language. In fact, I can access Brazilian journals, however, certain articles from the journal Nature or Science I cannot access directly and instead have to take a roundabout route of accessing the journals. Scopus often will display an article with the abstract but I may have to use alternate databases to access the entire article, which sometimes can be frustrating. A more minor issue is Scopus displays the chapter and book titles, yet I've found that it does not let me access it so again I have to find alternate routes. With that said, I prefer using Scopus over many other databases because it has a much simpler and easier to use interface, which is great seeing as how I'm not a computer wiz. It also allows some access to foreign journals written in English, which is great because there is a broader range of articles to access, so in the end, it's a very reliable easy to use database.

[CharonY]

For most purposes I use WoS, I have hardly used SCOPUS, so my knowledge on that is limited. What I like about WoS is that you can easily find which papers have cited a particular paper, which makes it easier to catch up on a given topic. I do not know whether SCOPUS has that feature.

Edited December 7, 2011 by CharonY