23/11/2007 | THES - QS World University Rankings
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Why Scopus?

The switch to Scopus for the 2007 rankings has been reasonably well publicised, but the reasons for the change merit further attention. What is Scopus? What is in Scopus? And what makes it a superior source of citations information than ESI from Thomson?

Scopus - refine your research

There are a number of articles out there comparing the three major sources of bibliometric data - Web of Science (from Thomson ISI - http://scientific.thomson.com/products/wos/), Scopus (www.scopus.com) and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com). A quick web search will reveal a volume of them but here are a few:

Regardless of the conclusions drawn, however, it is important to note that this has not been a switch between Web of Science and Scopus but a switch between ESI and Scopus. Even fans of the Web of Science would recognise that ESI is not a thorough interpretation of WoS.

So, that given, what is in Scopus?

Scopus offers the broadest, most integrated coverage of peer-reviewed scientific, technical, medical and social science literature and quality web sources. Updated daily, Scopus offers:

  • 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 international publishers
  • Over 1,000 open access journals
  • 500 conference proceedings
  • Over 600 trade publications
  • Over 125 book series
  • 30 million records, of which:
    • 15 million records include references going back to 1996
    • 15 million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1900
Content coverage:
  • Broadest coverage available of scientific, technical, medical and social sciences literature
  • Worldwide coverage; more than half of Scopus content originates from Europe, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region
  • References go back to 1996, abstracts go back further
  • 100% coverage of Medline
  • Coverage is over 99% complete as of 1996 (issue level).

For an overview of all titles and its coverage see www.info.scopus.com/docs/title_list.xls

The challenge

Attribution is a problem, many universities publish research under wide variations of their name. In tracking 566 universities in 2007, QS identified over 14,500 name variants. It seems inevitable that, with the cooperation of participating institutions over the coming months, that number will increase considerably in 2008.

Result

Using Scopus in 2007 has resulted in our being able to track data for 127 more institutions than in 2006 resulting in a better showing for many universities. A better reresentation from non-English language journals has led to better results from many countries where English is not the first language. Greater representation outside the US has yielded better results for non-US institutions. Despite differing characteristics, the citations data gathered from Scopus in 2007 correlates to that gathered from ESI in 2007 with a coefficient of 0.89.

The future

In time for 2008, QS will be building an interface whereby institutions can help us understand the mis-spellings, language variants and child institution names under which their research may have been published and the representation of this measure should only improve.

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