  Nowadays, the worlds scientific community has been publishing an enormous
number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is
essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for
literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of
Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used
to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations
received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article
attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to answer
frequent questions which researchers ask, such as: How Web of Science and
Scopus are different? In which aspects these two databases are similar? Or, if
the researchers are forced to choose one of them, which one should they prefer?
For answering these questions, these two databases will be compared based on
their qualitative and quantitative characteristics.
