Austrian Central Library for Physics

Our study aims at examining the suitability of Scopus for scientometric analyses in comparison with the Web of Science. The major research questions are: • To which extent are high impact SCI journals covered by Scopus? • Are the impact factor and the immediacy index usually lower for an SCI journal than the corresponding indicators computed in Scopus? • Are there high impact journals not covered by the JCR? • How reliable are the data in these two databases? This contribution deals only with journals from the subject pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. As a consequence, the findings presented here are only descriptive. They can be summarized as follows: • Each top-100 SCI pharmacy journal was covered by Scopus. • The impact factor was higher for 82 and the immediacy index greater for 78 journals in Scopus in 2005. Pharmacy journals with a high impact factor in the JCR usually have a high impact factor in Scopus. • Several high but no top-impact journal could be identified in Scopus which were not reported in JCR. • The two databases differed in the number of articles within a tolerable margin of deviation for most journals