Measuring Scholarly Productivity of Long Island Educational Institutions: Using Web of Science and Scopus as a Tool

Abstract

Objective – This paper explores how to utilize two well-known library databases, Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus, to quantify Long Island educational institutions’ scholarly productivity.

Methods – Institutions located in the Long Island region and within Nassau and Suffolk counties, including the State University of New York (SUNY) colleges, private institutions, and technical schools, were examined for the last 14 years (2000–2013). Eight Long Island institutions were represented in both databases and were included in the study.

Results – Of the eight institutions, Stony Brook University produced the most publications indexed in Web of Science and Scopus during the period of 2000–2013. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory yielded the second most publications during 2000–2013 in both Web of Science and Scopus, but it produced the highest quality publications compared with other institutions excluding Stony Brook University. Although the annual growth rates of Farmingdale State College and New York Institute of Technology increased dramatically in both Web of Science and Scopus, the large proportional increase did not represent a large increase in total value. Additionally, some institutions had a higher number of publications indexed in Web of Science than in Scopus, and others had a higher number of publications indexed in Scopus than in Web of Science.

Conclusions – Data were collected from institutions in Long Island with various institutional sizes, the number of faculty members employed may have made an impact on the number of publications. Thus, publication data in this study cannot be used to compare their rankings. Institutions with a similar type and similar size of faculty members should be selected for comparison. Due to the different coverage and scope of Web of Science and Scopus, institutions should use both databases to examine their scholarly output. Furthermore, institutions should consider using altmetrics to capture various impacts of the scholarly output to complement the traditional metrics.