Wos vs. Scopus: on the Reliability of Scientometrics

For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson-Reuters), produced the only available database making possible citation analysis, the Web of Science (WoS). Now, another company, Reed-Elsevier, has created its own bibliographic database, Scopus, available since 2002. For those who perform bibliometric analysis and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of rankings obtained from different data sources. Although several studies have compared the WoS and Scopus for Web use [BALL and TUNGER, 2006; BAR-ILAN, 2008; BOSMAN et al., 2006; FALAGAS et al., 2008; JACSO, 2005; MEHO and YANG, 2007; NORRIS and OPPENHEIM, 2007], no study has yet compared them in the context of a bibliometric production environment. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the ranking of countries in terms of the number of papers and the number of received citations. A high correlation between both rankings would suggest that these databases reflect the dynamics of knowledge production at the country level.