University-Wide Resource Trial: Scopus

Western Libraries will need to identify roughly $102,000 in subscription cancellations during the 2025-26 academic year to accommodate annual inflation on scholarly journals within a flat Resource Access Budget. This is equivalent to roughly 3.9 percent of our Resource Access Budget annually. 

One subscription we are evaluating as part of this year’s annual subscription review process is Web of Science, a multidisciplinary citation database widely used to discover research and analyze research impact. Much of the content included in Web of Science is discoverable through other comparable tools.   

We are seeking input from the university community on the extent to which the search and analysis capabilities, such as subject categories and citation metrics, within Web of Science are important to your teaching and research at Western, compared to those included in Scopus, a similar tool with a lower subscription cost.  

To facilitate this comparison of Web of Science and Scopus, we are running a Scopus trial from October 27 through November 14 . We hope for broad participation and invite you to complete a brief feedback survey.  

More in-depth information about Scopus can be found on the Scopus LibGuide and recent comparisons between Scopus and Web of Science are available from Iowa State University. 

The Scopus trial can be accessed from both on- and off-campus, via this link. Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to participate and provide feedback via this survey.  

Explore Scopus and let us know what you think!  

Scopus trial & feedback survey  

Questions? Contact your Subject Team or library.collections@wwu.edu