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Scopus Takes Research Evaluation Where It's Never Gone Before
By Iris Kisjes, Marketing Manager, Scopus, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Launched in November 2004, Scopus has rapidly become the premier tool for librarians and researchers who need to find and track scientific, technical, medical or social science literature. Marshall Clinton, the director of information technology services at the University of Toronto Libraries, predicted in 2004 that: “... there is no question that Scopus will not only become a key information source for science, technology and medicine, but also supplant some of the more traditional information sources.” And that prediction has indeed become reality.

Scopus is, quite simply, the largest and easiest to use navigation tool ever built. Winner of the International Information Industry Award for best Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Information Product (2005), it has become an acknowledged leader in STM product innovation, raising the bar in such areas as interface design and content coverage.

Scopus has already achieved significant acceptance throughout the scientific community with academic, government and corporate library customers worldwide. One of the primary factors contributing to its growth in popularity is the growth of Scopus content over the last two years.

Extremely Broad Coverage Helps Users

Featuring the broadest abstract and citation coverage currently available through any one online resource, Scopus covers over 15,000 titles from more than 4,000 publishers and includes open access and online-only journals. Users particularly appreciate Scopus’ extensive international coverage, which enables retrieval of citations not covered by any other database alone.

To ensure users remain at the center of all Scopus development, Elsevier in 2004 established an international Content Selection and Advisory Board comprising independent experts from all fields of science, whose mission is to evaluate and select information sources for inclusion in Scopus. Following a rigorous evaluation procedure, over 4 million records and 2,200 journals and 29 book series have been added to Scopus in the last two years.

Scopus content is not limited to peer-reviewed journal articles. What sets Scopus apart from its competitors is coverage that extends to 250 million scientific Web pages, 13 million patents and book series. A recent enhancement, Selected Sources, has added courseware, standards, theses, lecture notes, presentations, manuscripts and prepress papers from institutional repositories and digital archives that the user can select. The results are presented in a simple, tabbed format so the user has all the results in one place.

While the Scopus journal coverage policy provides for comprehensive inclusion from 1996 onward, 16 million journal article abstracts from before 1996 are already covered (in comparison to 12 million after 1996), and more journal abstracts and bibliographies will be added over time. The next major content expansion will include pre-1996 journal backfiles beginning with more than 7 million records in chemistry, mathematics, physics and social sciences.

Intuitive Interface and Innovative Tools Help Users

Prior to the commercial launch of Scopus, every aspect of its functionality was designed and tested by scientists and librarians to ensure that the interface is highly intuitive and easy to use. But innovations didn’t stop there.

Introduced in January 2006, the Scopus Citation Tracker enables users easily to evaluate research by using citation data. This tool offers at-a-glance intelligence about the influence of a set of articles, an author or group of authors over time, so users can quickly spot trends using a visual table of citations broken down by article and chronology.

In June 2006, the introduction of the Scopus Author Identifier meant that Scopus became the first database to “disambiguate” author names over such a comprehensive body of data. Using advanced algorithms, this powerful and innovative tool enables users to distinguish automatically between authors with the same name and match variations of author names.

Other important Scopus enhancements have included library integration tools, RSS feeds, compatibility with all major reference management tools and links from over 500,000 abstracts to chemical structures, compounds and reactions in MDL’s DiscoveryGate product.

Innovations and Additions Are Continuing Now and into the Future

Elsevier’s firm commitment to the Scopus user community and in broader terms to the global dissemination of scientific information means that Scopus development will extend throughout 2007 and beyond. Elsevier will continue to refine and enhance the interface, add functionality and expand the breadth and depth of coverage – ensuring that Scopus continues to help researchers focus on finding everything relevant, from the expected to the unexpected.