Scopus vs ISI WOS; Which One?

The competition between two international and multidisciplinary databases, i.e Scopus and WOS, motivated researchers to compare them to identify their similarities and differences.

Researchers who intend to publish their article, look for journals indexed by prestigious indexing companies, like Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, PubMed, Google Scholar and EBSCO.

Journal Indexing helps maintain the ethics and quality in terms of publication and increase visibility, validity, availability, and readership of a paper.

As discussed in the previous posts, journals can increase their reach and impact by getting their publication “indexed” by one or more leading databases.

To illustrate this, assume that you are buying a car, the seller explains to you the options of having that car, saying it has a safety certificate from a European country or an anti-theft certificate from a prominent company. You make sure that the car manufacturer has received valid certificates for this product.

In case of paper publication process, it is much the same as buying a good car; indexes are the standards and certifications that journals manage to take if they comply with a set of principles and rules applicable to each successful indexing body.

Simply put, index is in fact a standard system that different journals will be able to obtain if they adhere to the standards of that particular index.

For example, the ISI indexing has a set of rules and standards that journals must adhere to. If a journal requests to be indexed on the Clarivate Analytics (formerly called Thomson Reuters), it must comply with these rules and standards.

As you know, there are many indexing bodies to validate a journal, two of which are considered as the most trusted and popular journal indexing agencies referred by almost all researchers, i.e. ISI and Scopus, which index high quality peer-reviewed publications.

ISI Indexing

Thomson Reuters is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate that has a number of sub-sets, one of which is the Web of Science Database (WOS). WOS was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and is currently maintained by Clarivate Analytics. WOS journals provide the following indexes: Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded and recently-added Emerging Sources Citation Index.

The articles that are indexed on this database are popularly known as ISI articles. WOS has two types of journals: one with Impact Factor (JCR Journals) and the other without Impact Factor (ISI Listed Journals). You can refer to this link to make sure a magazine is indexed in Thomson Reuters Institute.

Scopus

Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. It was introduced by Elsevier in 2004 and contains over 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers.

In total, Scopus has indexed 3,500 scientific journals. Scopus is one of Elsevier’s products and using its information requires subscription and payment.

You can refer to this link to make sure a journal is indexed in Scopus.

Scopus vs. WOS