The h-index for countries in Web of Science and Scopus

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of recent experiments in determining the h-index at the country level for the 10 Ibero-American countries of South America. Design/methodology/approach – The three citation index components (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) of the Web of Science system of Thomson-Reuters and the Scopus database of Elsevier are used to gauge the comparability of the h-indexes reported by the two systems. Findings – The results show that in spite of the significant differences in the content of the two databases in terms of their source base and the extent of cited reference enhancement of records, the rank correlation of the ten countries based on the h-index values returned by Web of Science and Scopus is very high. Originality/value – For this sample, in spite of differences between WoS and Scopus in the number of papers from each country, the rank position of the countries by the h-index is almost the same. There is only a single rank position difference – Scopus rank Argentina second and Chile third, while the order is the reverse in WoS. This reconfirms the robustness of the h-index at the country level.