This spring, we conducted a survey of faculty and graduate students in order to better understand how they use and rely upon citation indexes like Web of Science & Scopus. We wanted to ensure that we would be aware of any loss of critical functions that could result from a cancellation. An email including the survey link was sent to all faculty and graduate students in early April and the survey was closed at the end of May, 2020.
There were a total of 75 completed responses.
By discipline, Web of Science and Scopus showed similar sets of users (mostly from STEM fields), whereas Google Scholar had a slightly larger percentage of users from the Social Sciences.
The functions people use and rely upon heavily - with backward and forward citation searching and finding impact factors or h-indices being at the top - appear to be remarkably similar across all the tools.
Respondents' Comfort Level with Canceling Web of Science:
Even among those who indicated Scopus would be insufficient, only about half provided any examples, when prompted. Of the examples that were given, the majority called out functionality that is actually provided by both tools. Those that identified actual gaps between the two tools mentioned:
From this survey, it appears that canceling Web of Science, while unpopular, should not leave our users without the critical functionality or information they need to do their work. Such a cancellation, though, would be disruptive and, for some, demoralizing. Looking broadly across all textual comments and responses, the two major underlying themes that are important to note are:
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