Scope and character

Scopus (Elsevier) is a large abstract and citation database covering science, technology, medicine, social sciences and the humanities. It is generally broader than Web of Science and is the source of CiteScore and the SJR journal metric, and of the auto-generated Scopus Author ID.

Strengths and limits

  • Strength: wider journal coverage, good author and affiliation profiling, strong analytics.
  • Limit: still selective (not everything is indexed); a subscription product, so access varies.
Worked example — Web of Science vs Scopus
For a multidisciplinary literature review spanning medicine and social science, Scopus’s broader net often returns more relevant results than Web of Science. For a tightly-benchmarked science comparison, Web of Science’s curation may be preferred. Many researchers check both.

🔗 Learn more (free): Scopus — about author profiles and the Author Identifier

Try it
If your institution has Scopus access, search your field and compare the result count with Google Scholar. Which feels more manageable, and why?

Self-check

Name one way Scopus typically differs from Web of Science in coverage.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) and institutional research-support materials. Linked resources remain under their own licences. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.

Última modificación: jueves, 4 de junio de 2026, 12:49