2009/03/30 by Eric Archambault, Éric Archambault, David Campbell +3 · 808 citations
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · #Bibliometrics #Citation #Citation impact #Comparability #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Computer science #Data science #Database #Impact factor #Information retrieval #Library science #MEDLINE #Mathematics #Political science #Scopus #Statistics #Web of science #cs.DL #cs.IR #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/asi.21062
published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(7), 1320-1326 (Wiley) · 9 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2009/03/30 · openalex publication_date 2009/04/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large‐scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of statistics obtained from different data sources. This paper uses macrolevel bibliometric indicators to compare results obtained from the WoS and Scopus. It shows that the correlations between the measures obtained with both databases for the number of papers and the number of citations received by countries, as well as for their ranks, are extremely high (R 2 ≈ .99). There is also a very high correlation when countries' papers are broken down by field. The paper thus provides evidence that indicators of scientific production and citations at the country level are stable and largely independent of the database.