Coverage and citation impact of oncological journals in the Web of Science and Scopus

This paper reviews a number of studies comparing Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus. It collates their journal coverage in an important medical subfield: oncology. It is found that all WoS-covered oncological journals (n=126) are indexed in Scopus, but that Scopus covers many more journals (an additional n=106). However, the latter group tends to have much lower impact factors than WoS covered journals. Among the top 25% of sources with the highest impact factors in Scopus, 94% is indexed in the WoS, and for the bottom 25% only 6%. In short, in oncology the WoS is a genuine subset of Scopus, and tends to cover the best journals from it in terms of citation impact per paper. Although Scopus covers 90% more oncological journals compared to WoS, the average Scopus-based impact factor for journals indexed by both databases is only 2.6% higher than that based on WoS data. Results reflect fundamental differences in coverage policies: the WoS based on Eugene Garfield’s concepts of covering a selective set of most frequently used (cited) journals; Scopus with broad coverage, more similar to large disciplinary literature databases. The paper also found that ‘classical’, WoS-based impact factors strongly correlate with a new, Scopus-based metric, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), one of a series of new indicators founded on earlier work by Pinski and Narin [Pinski, G., & Narin F. (1976). Citation influence for journal aggregates of scientific publications: Theory, with application to the literature of physics. Information Processing and Management, 12, 297–312] that weight citations according to the prestige of the citing journal (Spearman’s rho=0.93). Four lines of future research are proposed.