[Eril-l] FW: Switching from WOS to Scopus

[Sally Krash]

Sending this out to the list, since others are interested.

When I was at Southwest Research Institute, we switched from WoS to Scopus to save money and meet a reduced budget. Turns out, at that time, Scopus was much easier to use than WoS, and at a meeting of our research library council, when we compared the two, Scopus faired much better. The downside was that work for researchers/faculty that had been in their field for more than 20 years was not adequately represented.

Although we saved money, one of the big drawbacks was access to the WoS content that we had paid for over many years. That was provided to us on tape, which we stored because we did not have the means to build an interface to access that data in a way that WoS required.

Lastly, there is a comparable product to JCR rankings, called Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) - https://www.scimagojr.com/.

My personal thoughts on doing this again - I would only go this route for a small library or a library whose main focus is medical, as medical content seems to be well represented. For a medium to large academic research library, I would not.

I hope this is helpful.

Sally Krash
Associate Dean for Content and Discovery
UMass Amherst Libraries
krash at umass.edu<mailto:krash at umass.edu>
https://works.bepress.com/sallykrash/





From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>> On Behalf Of Remy, Charlie
Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2020 1:37 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Switching from WOS to Scopus


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Hi All,

For those of you whose libraries have cancelled Web of Science and moved to Scopus, I have a few questions:

·        Why did you switch to Scopus?
·        What content does Scopus have that Web of Science does not and vice versa?
·        Is Scopus easier or harder to use than Web of Science?
·        Did your library own Web of Science backfiles and lose access to them as a result of cancelling the current WOS subscription? If so, has the loss of these backfiles been problematic for researchers?
·        Does Scopus include a decent alternative to Journal Citation Reports rankings?
·        Are you glad you switched to Scopus?
·        Feel free to send any other thoughts related to Scopus and WOS

Thanks in advance!

Charlie Remy

Charlie Remy
Associate Professor
Electronic Resources and Serials Librarian
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Library
UTC-Dept 6456
600 Douglas St.
Chattanooga, TN 37403
charlie-remy at utc.edu<mailto:charlie-remy at utc.edu>
Tel. 423-425-4470<tel:423-425-4470>
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