The Journal Coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions: A Comparative Analysis

TL;DR

This study compares journal coverage across Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions, revealing significant differences in coverage, with Dimensions being the most comprehensive, and highlights how database choice affects research output analysis.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparative analysis of the journal coverage of three major scholarly databases using recent master journal lists, highlighting differences and implications.

Findings

Dimensions has the most exhaustive journal coverage.

Web of Science is the most selective database.

Database choice influences research output analysis.

Abstract

Traditionally, Web of Science and Scopus have been the two most widely used databases for bibliometric analyses. However, during the last few years some new scholarly databases, such as Dimensions, have come up. Several previous studies have compared different databases, either through a direct comparison of article coverage or by comparing the citations across the databases. This article attempts to compare the journal coverage of the three databases: Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions. The most recent master journal lists of the three databases have been used for the purpose of identifying the overlapping and unique journals covered in the databases. The results indicate that the databases have significantly different journal coverage, with the Web of Science being most selective and Dimensions being the most exhaustive. About 99.11% and 96.61% of the journals indexed in Web of Science are also indexed in Scopus and Dimensions, respectively. Scopus has 96.42% of its indexed journals also covered by Dimensions. Dimensions database has the most exhaustive coverage, with 82.22% more journals covered as compared to Web of Science and 48.17% more journals covered as compared to Scopus. We also analysed the research outputs for 20 highly productive countries for the 2010-2019 period, as indexed in the three databases, and identified database-induced variations in research output volume, rank and global share of different countries. In addition to variations in overall coverage of research output from different countries, the three databases appear to have differential coverage of different disciplines.