EPS INSIGHTS :: 29/01/2007
Confidential: EPS clients only
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IN-GAME ADVERTISING: MONETISING THE STORY
* Scopus, Elsevier's abstract and citation database, has added citation data, including abstracts, for many older papers. This takes Scopus into even closer competition with Thomson's Web of Science service.
by Dan Penny, Analyst
This deal signifies the success of Scopus over the two years since it was launched. Scopus is now attracting publishers who see that abstracts for their older journals need to be listed in Scopus to ensure they receive traffic from researchers who use the database as their first port of call.
The recent deals for this older content includes records from Springer, the Nature Publishing Group, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics, all of whom have digitised this content themselves back to volume 1, issue 1.
Scopus already contains 15 million pre-1996 records, and this deal is likely to add 7 million more. These new Scopus records will include full abstracts, which its end user research has reported is important to be included, even for older content. The inclusion of abstracts for older content has traditionally been a strength of Thomson's Web of Science, and was always an area where Elsevier had work to do. In an attempt to fill this gap, Scopus has therefore identified certain uses where adding additional abstracts would be useful - in particular for users when navigating and linking to older full text articles, and particularly in certain subjects where archive content has greater value: Physics, Chemistry, and Social Sciences, for example.
Scopus does not necessarily intend to index older content in all areas - partly because some historical journals have evolved in their lifetimes.
The Philosophical Magazine, for example, is a journal published by Informa on the structure and properties of condensed matter - but began in 1798, when the subject of 'natural philosophy' covered physics, medicine, astronomy and biology. The value of indexing abstracts from 200 years ago would clearly be limited, except for historical reasons. Scopus believes that 11 years of citation data is enough for certain purposes of research, too - for example, in the case of providing an overview of a publication for a grant or tenure application.
The value of older content is an interesting area for adding value - in some cases, researchers may be interested in older content purely to see the citations that their own research has received over the years, or may be used to study historical trends in research. Access to older full text papers may be of most use in non-Science areas of study - the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences having a longer tradition of qualitative argument, rather than quantitative experimentation. Content in the non-science disciplines is less well covered online - and this may represent a new arena in which Elsevier and Thomson start to compete.
However, as much of it is documented in books, rather than journals, it may be that Scopus and Web of Science start to expand the content which they index - and broadening these horizons may represent a way in which the two services can remain of value but grow apart.
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From the EPS archive
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Storytron: Is Interactive Storytelling The Future Of Fiction? EPS Insights, 19 May 2006 ::
http://www.epsltd.com/accessArticles.asp?articleType=1&updateNoteID=1957
International Serious Gaming Event: How Close To Success Is The Industry?
EPS Insights, 20 June 2006 ::
http://www.epsltd.com/accessArticles.asp?articleType=1&updateNoteID=1988
Pixelearning: Putting The Beans Into Serious Gaming, EPS Insights, 11 January 2006 ::
http://www.epsltd.com/accessArticles.asp?articleType=1&updateNoteID=1825
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