Scopus

Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 19,500 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, of which 16,500 are peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences (including arts and humanities). It is owned by Elsevier and is available online by subscription. Searches in Scopus incorporate searches of scientific web pages through Scirus, another Elsevier product, as well as patent databases.

Since Elsevier is the owner of Scopus, and is also one of the main international publishers of scientific journals, Elsevier established the independent and international Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board to prevent a potential conflict of interest in the choice of the periodicals to be included in the database and to maintain an open and transparent content coverage policy. The board consists of scientists and subject librarians from all scientific disciplines and geographical areas, whose interest is to access any relevant information regardless of the publishers.

A study from 2008 compares PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar and concludes " PubMed and Google Scholar are accessed for free Scopus offers about 20% more coverage than Web of Science, whereas Google Scholar offers results of inconsistent accuracy. PubMed remains an optimal tool in biomedical electronic research. Scopus covers a wider journal range but it is currently limited to recent articles (published after 1995) compared with Web of Science. Google Scholar, as for the Web in general, can help in the retrieval of even the most obscure information but its use is marred by inadequate, less often updated, citation information."

Evaluating ease of use and coverage of Scopus and the Web of Science, a study from 2006 concludes that "Scopus is easy to navigate, even for the novice user. The ability to search both forward and backward from a particular citation would be very helpful to the researcher. The multidisciplinary aspect allows the researcher to easily search outside of his discipline" and "One advantage of WOS over Scopus is the depth of coverage, with the full WOS database going back to 1945 and Scopus going back to 1966. However, Scopus and WOS compliment each others as neither resource is all inclusive. ".

Scopus also offers author profiles which cover affiliations, number of publications and their bibliographic data, references, and details on the number of citations each published document has received. It has alerting features that allows registered users to track changes to a profile and a facility to calculate authors' h-index.