Regional disparities in Web of Science and Scopus journal coverage

The two most important citation indexes used by the global science community contain marked regional disparities in their representation of academic journals. Existing work on the geographical coverage of Web of Science and Scopus citation indexes compared their coverage of journals in a small sample of ‘top’ countries. This paper offers the first regional analysis of journal representation in these two indexes across all eight UNESCO world regions, compared to the total number of active Ulrich’s directory academic journals in these regions. Journal lists from 239 countries/territories were collected from Ulrich’s periodical directory and analyzed by region. This enables a comparison of the regional distribution of journals within Web of Science (20,255 matched journals) and Scopus (23,348 matched journals) with those in Ulrich’s directory (83,429 journals). Journals published in Europe, Oceania and North America were more likely to be indexed in Scopus and Web of Science compared to other world regions. Journals published in sub-Saharan Africa were the most underrepresented and were four times less likely to be indexed than those published in Europe. The analysis also offers a quantitative breakdown of journal publication languages, highlighting how Scopus and Web of Science disproportionately index English language publications in all world regions. Finally, the analysis shows how field coverage by Web of Science and Scopus differs between the regions, with the Social Sciences and Humanities still under-represented, in comparison to Natural Sciences and Medical & Health Science.