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We compare the network of aggregated journal–journal citation relations provided by the J ournal C itation R eports ( JCR ) 2012 of the S cience Citation Index ( SCI ) and S ocial S ciences C itation I ndex ( SSCI ) with similar data based on S copus 2012. First, global and overlay maps were developed for the 2 sets separately. Using fuzzy‐string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the 2 sets: 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR , or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by S copus. Network analysis was pursued on the set of journals shared between the 2 databases and the 2 sets of unique journals. Citations among the shared journals are more comprehensively covered in JCR than in S copus, so the network in JCR is denser and more connected than in S copus. The ranking of shared journals in terms of indegree (i.e., numbers of citing journals) or total citations is similar in both databases overall ( S pearman rank correlation ρ > 0.97), but some individual journals rank very differently. Journals that are unique to S copus seem to be less important—they are citing shared journals rather than being cited by them—but the humanities are covered better in Scopus than in JCR .
Leydesdorff et al. (Thu,) studied this question.