Amsterdam, 11 January, 2010 - Elsevier announced today that Scopus Custom Data, the underlying source of Scopus.com, the world’s largest abstract and citation (A&C) database, was selected by Forschungszentrum Jülich, one of the leading research centers in Europe, to calculate global reference values at subject and country levels.
Forschungszentrum Jülich is a member of Helmholtz Association, Germany\'s largest scientific organization in terms of staff and budget. Forschungszentrum Jülich is the only research institute of its kind within the Helmholtz Association that conducts bibliometric analysis and works with raw data, a primary reason for the partnership between Elsevier and Jülich. They found that the breadth of content in Scopus allowed for more German and international literature from a single data source to be captured, thereby providing the broadest content coverage. Scopus currently covers 1,326 active German titles.
“The Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich undertakes bibliometric analyses for scientific managers and heads of institutes in order to evaluate scientific output. By installing Scopus locally, we intend to benefit from more precise searches and to make the most of using worldwide bibliometric comparisons as a benchmark,” said Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library. “Another benefit of a local database installation is that it enables error checking of the data at the same time. Overall, we believe this will help us to further refine bibliometrics at Jülich.”
“We are very proud to be collaborating with an institution with the stature of Forschungszentrum Jülich,” stated Niels Weertman, Director, Performance & Planning and Collaboration Tools for Elsevier. “Scopus custom data continues to set the research standard and we look forward to working with Jülich to improve the method of bibiliometric analysis.”
Jülich is one of many similar institutions around the world that are now using Scopus data as an authoritative data source for research performance measurement including: the Australian Research Council, and more recently the University of Göeteborg in Sweden.