A Comparison of Web of Science and Scopus for Iranian Publications and Citation Impact

This study mainly aims to compare the quantity of Iranian publications and their citation impact in the two popular citation databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The documents which specified Iran as their affiliated country published during 1998-2007 were selected as Iran’s publications in the two databases. During the examined years, Iran has published 49198 documents in Scopus and 35061 documents in WOS. Based on the results, the number of Iranian publications was higher in Scopus than WOS and also the number of citations per publication in Scopus was rather doubled in comparison with WOS. Although the number of cited publications was increasing in both databases, the percentage of cited publications in Scopus was more than WOS. In contrast, WOS embodies more number of non-cited Iranian publications than Scopus. Engineering was the most productive field as reflected by Iranian publications in Scopus while in WOS the most number of Iranian publications were published in Chemistry. Additionally, the growth rate of publications was calculated in different fields. Molecular Biology and Genetics as well as Biology and Biochemistry areas had the highest growth rate in WOS and Scopus, respectively.