Web of Science versus Scopus in Communication Studies: proposal of an analysis system and results

Abstract

For a long time, the key reference in academic databases at an international level and in any academic field has been the database formerly known as ISI (which stands for Institute for Scientific Information, its founding company). ISI is currently called Web of
Science (WoS) and owned by the media conglomerate Thomson Reuters. 

Within this context, the appearance in recent years of a new database called Scopus, owned by the Elsevier group, provided a necessary and much sought for competition, as well as a justified hope that its tools would improve the thematic coverage in the field of social sciences and humanities in general, and social communication in particular.

For a communication researchers might have some questions on these databases: do both databases offer the same functions?, is the coverage in one of the two databases more suitable for the field of communication?, and do they provide similar geographical and cultural, or geographical and linguistic coverage? This article presents a comparative between WoS and Scopus to try and answer the questions posed.