Document Types Indexed in WoS and Scopus: Similarities, Differences, and Their Significance in the Analysis of Publication Activity

The article presents comparative data concerning the types of the same publications between two of the world’s leading scientific information systems – Web of Science and Scopus – and publishers. This paper shows significant differences in the typification of documents in a sample of the 3843 most actively cited works with Russian authorship of various types for the period 2010–2020. It shows that the type of publication is not an obvious criterion: the same work can be assigned different types depending on the source of information. The revealed discrepancies of information from various sources give grounds for a certain skepticism regarding the correctness of the formulation of tasks in the analysis of publication activity concerning the accounting of publications of only certain types. The results of this study suggest that if it is necessary to take into account only certain types of publications, information on the types of documents should be verified with the original information from publishers.