Web of Science and Scopus: A Comparative Review of Content and Searching Capabilities

"[] In particular, this review will compare and contrast the content of the two databases by comparing (a) the comprehensiveness in coverage of 110 journals over a broad spectrum of fields to look at their completeness in indexing and their timeliness in updating; (b) the retrieval of searches based on seven departmental affiliations from one university, highlighting the number of articles retrieved, their citation counts and H-indexes (the value of H is equal to the number of papers [N] that have N or more citations); (c) the citation counts for 10 journal articles; and (d) publication counts from six universities. The usefulness of both databases in studying an institution’s research output and aiding in collection assessment/development activities will be discussed. The article will also provide methods that might be useful for extracting information from these databases that could be useful for collection development purposes. In addition, it will focus on the ease of use and understanding of the databases for the average user, capabilities available for searching, and the unique features each offers. [...]"

(source: The Charleston Advisor, Volume 11, Number 1, July 2009 , pp. 5-18(14))