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Scopus compared to Web of Science

Coverage	Scopus outnumbers the more scholarly Web of Science in terms of journal coverage ( Web of Science covers 10 000 peer-reviewed journals and Scopus 17 300 to-date (2010)) as well as in terms of coverage of conference proceedings and book series. But Scopus has fewer back files : In Science Citation Index (as main part of Web of Science ) back files generally reach back until 1900 and all records are reference enhanced, whereas in Scopus roughly only half of the content is pre-1996. Scopus covers In Press Articles of 3000 journals, whereas Web of Science only entails published works. In contrast to Web of Science , Scopus covers Medline/PubMed data completely. Itcovers some relevant repositories , too (e.g., CogPrints).
Reference Linking	In Web of Science , all records are enriched with indexed references, whereas in Scopus references are indexed only since 1996
Search Funktionalities	Web of Science and Scopus share a lot of features: Alerting services, a feature to find Related Records , too (in Web of Science based only on references, in Scopus optionally based on references, authors or keywords), and, like Web of Science , Scopus allows to refine results according to subject areas, authors, source titles, years and document types. In Scopus , it ispossible to sort and filter very large result lists whereas in Web of Science only up to 10 000 items can be processed.
Author and Institution Identification	Scopus creates a distinct Author IDs , which are, however, not completely error-free. Searching for institutions is more intuitive than in Web of Science . Unlike Web of Science , Scopus uses UTF-8 and is therefore able to process mutated vowels and any special characters .
Data Quality	According to some current tests held by colleagues from central MPS unit IVS-CPT there are bigger weaknesses regarding data quality in Scopus than in Web of Science
Browser Compabitility	Please user Scopus always with standard browsers like Mozilla or IE; our Linux browser Iceweasel displays some grave errors in the Scopus' interface.

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Last update: Sep 8, 2010 10.41.26 am

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