Web of Science is a major citation indexing platform which gives access to multiple databases that reference cross-disciplinary research. You can generate a citation report that provides citation counts and the author h-index for a set of publications. Please see 3 Simple Steps to Generate your Web of Science (WoS) Citation Report.
InCites is a citation analysis tool designed for quantitative analyses of research performance based on Web of Science data. It provides information on the citation ranking data of researchers, institutions, countries, and journals. InCites handbook is available.
Scopus is another major abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. You can find definitions on metrics in Scopus via quick reference tool. To generate a citation report from Scopus, please refer to 3 Simple Steps to Generate your Scopus Citation Report. Researchers can request for programmatic access to citation data, metadata, and abstracts from indexed scholarly journals in Scopus, and full-text journals and books on the ScienceDirect full-text platform at no charge, for non-commercial use, subject to Elsevier's policies and limits on usage (see here).
SciVal is a research performance assessment tool based on data in Scopus. SciVal can provide analysis of the performance of individuals or groups of researchers and institutions worldwide. Please refer to SciVal Metrics Guidebook for more information on the metrics covered in SciVal. To request for access to SciVal, please see instructions here.
Authors can set up their own Google Scholar Profiles which allow them to populate all their publications indexed in Google Scholar and see metrics such as citation counts and h-index. Please see 3 Simple Steps to Prepare your Google Scholar (GS) Profile.
The Lens is a free and open resource used to find, analyze, and manage scholarly works, patents and sequence data in patents. With more than 200 million records, it is one of the largest indexes currently available. APIs and bulk data are available via a 14-day free trial (see here).
Dimensions is a linked data platform launched in 2018 by Digital Science, with full-text indexing for discovery. The free version of the database includes access to publication, datasets and citation counts. Access to grants, policy documents, patents or clinical trial information requires paid subscription. Dimensions also offers free access for non-commercial scientometric research projects, through which users will get access to Dimensions Analytics, the Dimensions API and/or Dimensions data on Google BigQuery. For more information, see here.
Based on Web of Science Core Collection data, you can identify the influential individuals, institutions, papers, publications, and countries in your field of study.
|
Comparison |
Web of Science |
Scopus |
Google Scholar |
Lens |
Dimensions |
|
Content Coverage |
|
|
Peer-reviewed papers, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports |
|
|
|
Period Covered |
From 1900- |
From 1970- |
Not specified |
Records dating back from 1800- |
Records dating back from 1665- |
|
Language coverage |
Mainly English (less than 10% are non-English documents) |
Mainly English (less than 10% are non-English documents) |
Multiple languages |
Multiple languages |
Mainly English |
| Data Source(s) |
Web of Science databases and Core Collection Indexes. |
For Scopus Source List, download from link. |
For details, see link. |
Various patent offices, CORE, CrossRef, PubMed, ORCiD, Microsoft Academic (retired in Dec 2021), Unpaywall, Directory of Open Access Journals, rXiv preprint repositories, etc. For details, see link. |
Metadata is harvested from sources such as CrossRef, PubMed, Directory of Open Access Journals, Open Citation Data, clinical trial registries, patent offices, and publishers. Full-text data are indexed from open sources such as PubMed Central and arXiv (see link). Datasets are sourced from Figshare and other repositories such as Dryad, Zenodo and Pangea (see link). |
|
Author Profile |
WoS Researcher Profiles. Authors can claim and request for corrections, and sync to ORCID profiles. |
Scopus Author Profiles. Authors can request for corrections and sync to ORCID profiles. |
Authors manually setup Google Scholar Profiles. |
Lens Profiles. Authors can claim and sync with ORCID profiles. |
Researcher profiles. Authors can request for corrections and sync to ORCID profiles. |
|
Bidirectional syncing from/to Web of Science Researcher Profile. |
Add Scopus Author ID to ORCID profile |
None. Manual export of publications from Google Scholar to ORCID only. |
Bidirectional sync between Lens Profile and ORCID. |
Unidirectional sync from Dimensions to ORCID. |
|
|
Citations to |
Journal articles, proceeding papers, books/chapters, meeting abstracts |
Journal articles, proceeding papers, books/chapters |
Articles, books/chapters, theses, preprints, meeting abstracts, technical reports, patents, supplementary materials, etc. |
Journal articles, proceeding papers, books/chapters, preprints, patents |
Journal articles, proceeding papers, books/chapters, preprints (patents, grants, clinical trials under subscription) |
|
Metrics |
Number of publications, citations, citation percentile, h-index, category normalized citation impact, journal impact factor, journal citation indicator, etc. |
Number of publications citations, citation percentile, h-index, field weighted citation impact, CiteScore, source normalized impact per paper, SCImago journal rank, etc. |
Citations, h-index, i10-index |
Number of publications citations, h-index, collaborative ratio, etc. |
Number of publications, citations, relative citation ratio, etc. |
Data accurate as of Dec 2022
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