Citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of human-computer interaction researchers:A comparison of Scopus and Web of Science

This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR—a large British Interdisci-plinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to cover-age of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are com-pared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of indi-vidual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Sco-pus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially when citations in conference proceedings are sought, and that researchers should manually calculate h scores instead of relying on system calculations