Compare

Scopus vs Web of Science

Both are paid institutional citation indexes; Scopus trades editorial selectivity for broader coverage, Web of Science curates a smaller Core Collection.

Side by side

Scopus Web of Science
Vendor Elsevier Clarivate
Pricing model Quote only Quote only
Free tier No No
Deployment Cloud Cloud
Open source No No
Best for Institutions wanting broader journal coverage than Web of Science, especially alongside SciVal analytics. Research offices and librarians who need a selectively curated citation index for formal impact reporting.
Pricing

Sold as an institutional subscription; Elsevier does not publish list prices.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Sold as an institutional subscription; Clarivate does not publish list prices.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features
  • Abstract and citation coverage across STM and social sciences
  • CiteScore journal-level metrics
  • Author and institutional affiliation profiles
  • Scopus AI conversational literature search
  • Patent citation linking
  • Funding acknowledgment data
  • Direct integration with SciVal analytics
  • API access for institutional data pulls
  • Citation indexing with cited-reference search back to 1900
  • Editorially curated Core Collection
  • Journal Citation Reports / Impact Factor integration
  • Author disambiguation via ResearcherID and ORCID
  • Citation reports and h-index calculation
  • Cross-search with regional and specialty indexes
  • API access for bulk bibliometric data
  • InCites integration for institutional benchmarking

Verdict

Scopus and Web of Science are the two long-established commercial citation indexes, and the choice between them usually comes down to coverage philosophy rather than any single feature. Web of Science's Core Collection applies editorial selection criteria before a journal is added, which Clarivate and many institutions position as favoring quality and consistency over raw breadth; it also underpins the Journal Citation Reports and the journal impact factor itself. Scopus generally indexes a larger set of journals and conference proceedings, with CiteScore as its own journal-level metric, trading some editorial selectivity for wider coverage, particularly of conference proceedings and less-established venues.

Because the two draw on different underlying source sets, citation counts for the identical paper will differ between them — that's a coverage difference, not an error in either tool. Pick one as your institution's system of record for formal reporting rather than mixing numbers from both in the same report.

Choose Scopus if

  • Your field publishes heavily in conferences or newer, still-establishing journals that a more selective index might exclude.
  • You already use or plan to use SciVal for institutional benchmarking, since it's built directly on Scopus data.
  • You want Scopus AI's conversational search layer over the same underlying database.

Choose Web of Science if

  • You need the specific editorial curation of the Core Collection for formal impact reporting or accreditation purposes.
  • You use EndNote for reference management or InCites for institutional benchmarking, both of which integrate natively.
  • Your citation analysis needs to go back further — Web of Science's cited-reference data extends to 1900.

What they share

Both are sold as institutional subscriptions with no public price list, both offer author and institutional profiles, and both provide API access for bulk data pulls. Neither is free; for a no-cost alternative with broad, open coverage, see OpenAlex, and for AI-assisted literature triage, Semantic Scholar.

Last reviewed September 22, 2026

In the index now