Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar are three valuable tools for researchers, which are often used when conducting literature research, evaluation of research/researchers and citation analyses. Therefore it might be interesting and useful to learn how they differ from each another.

Scopus (belongs to the publisher of scientific literature Elsevier) and WoS (belongs to the information broker Clarivate Analytics) are commercial subscription databases, which means that the university library pays a campus license to have access to the database. Google Scholar on the other hand is free to access to anyone with an internet connection.

All three databases collect and index scientific literature. When searching for literature the search results show the title, the author(s), the source (journal, book, conference proceedings etc.), the abstract and the citations (references cited in the article as well as articles that cited the source). Especially useful for literature search are the citations, as you can easily find related and relevant literature for your project/research. Since these databases are not fulltext databases you will not get direct access to the fulltext. But there is a link called findit@unibz which automatically checks if the university library has already licensed the material through a publisher and if so you have immediate access to the fulltext.

Scopus and WoS offer a lot of bibliometric data and possibilities for data analysis as well, they also are the reference databases for the bibliometric sectors of the ASN (Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale).

The big difference between the databases is the content: in Scopus and WoS editors select and curate which journals, books, conference proceedings and other materials are inserted. Google Scholar on the other hand will include everything that can be found via automated processes (crawling), which means that there is no quality control or filtering. Consequently, Google Scholar has much more content, but it is less structured and it is more likely to include errors in the metadata as well as including documents like presentations, posters, grey literature, websites and others. Scopus and WoS prioritize English literature, while Google Scholar is more inclusive to different languages. All three databases though, while a lot of content is present in all, differ substantially in coverage and therefore it can be useful to consult all of them when doing research.