Scopus versus WoS database

CorText Manager Q&A forumCategory: Data processingScopus versus WoS database
orianabras asked 11 months ago

Dear colleagues,
I am building a database on bioremediation. My query in WoS retrieves 36000 results whereas the same query in Scopus retrieves 70000. Since I need a good coverage of this research worldwide I am considering using the Scopus database.
My question is: do Scopus databases have the same of info for each publication as WoS? Does CorTexT perform well on Scopus databases, that is, is it possible to run network scripts for ex.? I have read some articles comparing the two databases but they do not mention these specific issues related to scientometric and other analysis.
Merci beaucoup!

1 Answers
Géraldine Enderli Staff answered 11 months ago

Dear Oriana,
Thanks for your regular use of our platform CorText Manager.

CorText Manager allows you to import data directly extracted from multiple databases and applications, including Web of Science and Scopus (see “Upload corpus” documentation section). Indeed, specific parsers are proposed for these two sources of data. The principle of the parsers in CorText manager is as follows: they filter data in order to keep only useful data and metadata and do some pre-processing in order to make them then analyzable by CorText Manager (e.g. authors’ addresses present in WOS/Scopus exports will be restructured into several fields in the sqlite database created by CorText Manager (i.e. institution, city, country) making the data directly processable). During the parsing step, variables are renamed by CorText Manager and so you will find easily understandable names in the sqlite database created by the parser and when choosing fields/parameters in the CorText analysis’ scripts.

For both Scopus and Web of Science, CorText Manager’s parsers will allow you to work with the same classical data/metadata used in the field of scientometrics: in particular you will find title, abstract, keywords, authors’, author’s affiliation, document type, date, journal. You will be able to use CorText manager’s scripts as for WOS data, including network mappings.
Nevertheless, Scopus seems to have recently implemented a new version of its platform and, on our side, we can no longer extract the cited references (despite the fact that we select the information “include references” in the Scopus data export window). We did not investigate this problem further for the Scopus platform. So be careful if you want to work on the cited references of the documents extracted from Scopus – as it is possible with the data coming from the WOS -, you may have to go back to the old version of the Scopus platform.

Don’t hesitate to look at the documentation (see “Data Parsing” documentation section) for a good comprehension on how the data is structured in the CorText Manager database. You can also download the sqlite database obtained after the data parsing of your Scopus corpus and read it outside CorText manager (using freely accessible tools like DBBrowser, DBeaver…). This will allow you to easily explore and fully understand data that you have at your disposal for your treatments.

Best regards