We’ve been evaluating our academic literature databases over the Summer and learned there has been a steady drop in the use Web of Science, a multidisciplinary citations database. To see whether an alternative may work better, we ran a trial of Scopus during July.
With over 23,500 serial titles and 75 million items, Scopus has a broader reach than Web of Science, indexing more academic journals and also couples a clean interface with features such a suite of data visualisations for your search results. Additionally, it works better with Pure, the University’s research information repository.
The Trial
During July we set up a trial subscription to Scopus – this was a big success! We received lots of requests to subscribe and the platform earned favourable comparisons with popular tools like Google Scholar (you can see some comments here).
The Decision
Given that Scopus received such positive feedback from staff and students, and has improved scope and usability, we have taken a multidisciplinary approach and decided to move from Web of Science to Scopus. As such, access to WoS will cease at end of September and we will have Scopus live from 16 September.
All students and staff will be able to access Scopus, and we are confident you find it a big improvement. We are arranging training for mid-November, and our ‘Literature Search for Research’ session is already available for booking via MyView. If you have any saved searches or alerts from Web of Science which you would like to transfer across to Scopus, please contact [email protected] for support with this.