Overlap articles of respiratory system in databases Scopus and Web of Science: brief report

Background: Due to the overlap between the databases of the subject and content, resulting in the purchase of duplication and waste of resources, in this study, the degree of overlap between respiratory system papers indexed in the database, Scopus and Web of Science during the years 2001 to 2010 were examined. Methods: In this survey study, researcher followed by obtaining percent overlap in the articles related to respiratory system field from 2001 to 2010. At first sub-headings contained in the following subject headings from medical thesaurus of (Mesh 2012) extracted and then each keyword in title of articles in both database search and articles were retrieved. Then bibliographic information of these articles enter into EndNote version X3 (Thomson Reuters Inc., New York, NY, USA) and then in alphabetical order title arranged and as a result, common articles between the two databases and unique articles to each site was determined. Using SPSS software version 0.1.0.8 amount of the relative overlap and traditional overlap between the two databases was calculated and the results by using descriptive statistics to determine and were presented in tables. Results: In total 18099 articles were retrieved. That number of 9768 common articles, there were 7225 articles uniquely Scopus and 1106 articles from Web of Science. Amount of percent traditional overlap 53.97% and the overlap percent Web of Science with Scopus was 57.48% and Scopus with Web of Science was 89.83%. Conclusion: Because of overlaping the contents of two information databases such as scopus and web of sciences searching for accessing to respiratory system from scopus is better due to containing unique papers ,However it is highly recommended to pay to this point while buying and sharing the mentioned resources