Varying Resonance Chambers: A Comparison Of Citation-Based Valuations Of Duplicated Publications In Web Of Science And Scopus

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus serve similar functions to the academic community as bibliometric databases, however their content and coverage is known to vary due to their owners' different business philosophies. In this paper, we investigated the impact of the differences in content and coverage between WoS and Scopus on citation-based bibliometric indicators. We calculated the excellence rates for ten countries and the sectors of the German science system to examine the macro-level effects of the differences. We then examined the impact at the micro-level by comparing the normalised citation counts between databases for the publications indexed in both WoS and Scopus by OECD discipline, using German publications from 2009 as an example. We found that WoS "favoured" base research as German sectors in this domain received higher citation-based impact values than in Scopus, while sectors that focused on applied research performed better in Scopus. WoS and Scopus apparently constitute two different resonance chambers and consequently the same content, given its orientation towards applied or base research, will receive a diverging citation-based impact value. Researchers need to consider these differences in focus when selecting a database for bibliometric analyses.