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Tracking Researchers' Output, Identifying Their Collaborators and Competitors, and Identifying Important Publications

Tracking Researchers' Output, Identifying Their Collaborators and Competitors, and Identifying Important Publications
By Richard Sweeney, University Librarian, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA

Scholarly output, a major part of the lifeblood of any research university, is getting a lot of airplay these days. Everyone’s investing time and energy to track and analyze citations and thus prove the value of researchers and universities. Here I wish to say that tackling such a big job needn’t be as hard as it might sound.

Through the use of Scopus, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I and library colleagues have been performing citation analysis quickly and efficiently and then applying the results to meet very important real-life needs. By using Scopus to perform citation analysis, we help our researchers by identifying their collaborators and competitors; we help our institute by identifying researchers and faculty worthy of recruitment; we help our institute by identifying faculty deserving of promotion and tenure; and we help our library by identifying data important to collection development.

Here I’m going to show you how we use Scopus to perform citation analysis on our researchers’ scholarly output, identify our researchers’ collaborators and competitors, and identify publications important to our university’s scholarly output and likely important to our library’s collection.

We Use Scopus to Track Researchers’ Scholarly Output and Identify Their Collaborators and Competitors

Let’s take for example Dr. Mengchu Zhou, an NJIT professor. Dr. Zhou is an expert on Petri nets, or bipartite graphs that provide mathematically rigorous frameworks for modeling systems exhibiting concurrency, synchronization and randomness. Automated manufacturing systems especially make use of Petri nets, which are also known as “place/transition nets.”

Using Scopus, we can gain insights into Dr. Zhou’s scholarly output focused on Petri nets and we can quickly identify other researchers active in Petri net exploration. These individuals comprise Dr. Zhou’s collaborators and competitors. By taking a look at Dr. Zhou’s and his peers’ scholarly output, we can assess how the researchers stack up against each other and how they rank in the field. Dr. Zhou very well may appreciate a copy of the findings; by providing this information, the Van Houten Library at NJIT can offer Dr. Zhou support in his research efforts. Naturally we can also make sure Dr. Zhou is aware of Scopus, knows how to access it through the library and feels happy doing his own similar research if he wishes.

1. To start to gain understanding of Dr. Zhou’s output focusing on Petri nets, we use the term “petri net” and Dr. Zhou’s name and search Scopus.

2. To start to see where Dr. Zhou’s output fits within the context of Petri net literature, we locate all Petri net articles published and indexed in Scopus.

3. To gain understanding of how Dr. Zhou’s output compares with that of the other most prodigious Petri net researcher over all the years for which Scopus has data, we look at the output of Zhou versus Tadao.

4. To gain understanding of how Dr. Zhou’s performance ranks in the Petri net field, we look at the output of Zhou versus that of all other Petri net authors whose work has been indexed by Scopus.

5. To identify Dr. Zhou’s current potential collaborators and competitors, we look at Petri net publications from recent years.

6. To identify all most likely current potential collaborators and competitors, we drill down to the most “cited by” Petri net authors in the past five years.

We Use Scopus to Identify Important Publications

Space here doesn’t allow for showing every step involved in searching Scopus and using it to pull data needed for analysis and decision making, data crucial to a library providing support to its researchers and institution. Suffice it to say that though this article omits steps, colleagues will find themselves navigating easily and well around Scopus – which offers a very usable and friendly interface.

Another way we at NJIT’s Van Houten Library are using Scopus is to identify publications important to our researchers and thus comprising good candidates for our collection.

Still following the story of Dr. Zhou, we can simply take advantage of work already done on Scopus.

To obtain a list of publications important to Dr. Zhou and his peers in Petri net research, we simply need to look at the most “cited by” authors in the past five years and see in what titles they have published. The screenshot above shows part of the list Scopus generated.

This list of publications, so important to Petri net researchers including NJIT’s own Dr. Zhou, deserves careful consideration when it comes time for decisions. For collection management, Scopus can provide librarians with data complementing or sometimes trumping usage statistics. When our library doesn’t already subscribe to particular publications, of course we have no information (beyond the anecdotal) on whether our researchers would those titles. But with Scopus at hand, we can easily identify publications important to particular researchers and let citation-related data help guide us in acquisitions.

This concludes my brief remarks, not intended to be any kind of comprehensive user guide but rather to illustrate a couple of ways Scopus has saved time and contributed to important efforts at NJIT. Believe it or not, it’s taken longer to write down my thoughts than it did to conduct all the citation analysis shown here and conducted via Scopus. Happy navigating, everybody!