Comparison of journal title coverage between CINAHL and Scopus.

This study compares the journal source coverage of CINAHL, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, and Scopus to determine whether Scopus alone provides a thorough search of the nursing and allied health literature. Scopus is a relative newcomer to the world of online indexes covering the medical and scientific literature. Its total coverage of more than 23,700 sources is multidisciplinary and includes non-journal types—such as conference papers, book series, and trade publications—that are not covered by MEDLINE/PubMed or CINAHL. However, according to the publisher, Scopus indexes all of the MEDLINE and EMBASE/Excerpta Medica journals and therefore can be a useful alternative to searching those databases independently. The question then arises: how complete is its coverage of nursing and allied health literature? If it also indexes a large percentage of that literature, Scopus could be a viable integrated search engine for all medical, nursing, and allied health searching needs. This information could help health sciences libraries make wise acquisition decisions. A number of articles have analyzed the coverage of journals in Scopus with specific emphasis on its citation tracking ability, compared to Web of Science [1–3]. The study by de Moya-Anagon et al. [4] provided a comprehensive analysis of Scopus compared to the Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory list of available journals in all fields and calculated a percentage of Scopus's coverage by subject category. Gavel and Iselid's study [5] not only looked at the citation database Web of Science, but also studied the coverage overlap of various science, technology, and medicine (STM) databases. However, Gavel and Iselid did not include CINAHL among the comparison databases, and Ulrich's does not have separate subject categories for nursing or many of the allied health subjects such as occupational or physical therapy. No studies have focused specifically on the coverage of nursing and allied health literature in Scopus. Therefore, this brief analysis attempts to fill that gap and provide some data to determine whether Scopus could be an alternative to CINAHL.