| Summary of Latest Enhancements in Scopus | |
The following enhancements have been made to Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research, on Saturday, November 3, 2007.
In the scientific world, the major research trends express more competition, more inter-disciplinary research, more international collaboration between institutions and researchers spending more time on finding information than analyzing. Researchers are challenged to identify all relevant information, find the information effectively, evaluate research output, measure performance and monitor trends.
Scopus takes the next step to further increase research productivity by enhancing the researcher’s workflow. On November 3, 2007, Scopus will introduce substantive new features and content to support the scientific literature research process and the challenges researchers are facing.
Scopus introduces new features that make it even easier to use, search for and find information more effectively:
1. Searching and browsing of cited references
Can I find all references of an article, an author or group of authors in one overview?
Who is citing my work and where am I cited?
Which sources are actually used in the library?
The new cited reference searching and browsing on Scopus provides a powerfully flexible research tool to find information that may have been missed otherwise. Researchers can search additional relevant content derived from references and find related documents based on citations.
Answering the above questions, users can:
Browsing of cited references:
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Overview of the sources used by a researcher |
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The new cited-by button on the Scopus results page |
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Find all citing documents for any set of documents |
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Determine which sources are being used by researchers |
Browsing references will allow to view all de-duplicated cited references for a set of documents in a single overview. This will help users find related documents based on both backward and forward citations more easily. Working with the complete reference list, it will be possible to:
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A consolidated list of references from four selected documents |
It will also be possible to browse the list of references of a particular article from the record page to easily sort or refine.
Searching cited references:
If I run a search on Scopus, how do I know what’s published in, for example books, about my topic?
Every search will now feature an additional results tab – marked “More” – which displays the references that match a given query. These are results derived from the references section(s) in Scopus’ documents and not covered by Scopus as such (e.g. books, thesis and older articles). As a consequence it will be easier to locate relevant results within approximately 50 million additional references and, wherever possible, link through to the relevant full-text sources.
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The new “More” tab, which displays the references that match a given query |
2. More and flexible clustering categories
How will I be able to select only peer-reviewed material in Scopus? How can I select articles only in my own language?
Already extremely popular with users, the Refine Results feature will be further enhanced with the addition of the following categories: language of the full-text article, source type and article-level keywords. This allows users to manage their search results more effectively, easily pinpointing the information they are looking for.
As an additional benefit, users will be able to customize which dimensions they wish to have displayed with the intuitive drag and drop functionality. Settings can be stored in My Profile.
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Additional categories to refine results are optionally available |
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3. Improved visibility of conference papers
Users, especially those in the Corporate sector, indicated the need to be able to focus on emerging scientific work and nascent research trends originating from conference papers.
It will now be possible to initiate a conference paper-specific search directly from Basic Search.
In addition, conference papers will now appear as a separate document type in the Refine Results box. Previously listed under the generic heading of “articles” (industry standard), this change reflects both the special nature of this type of material and its growing importance in the content portfolio of Scopus as a whole.
By increasing the visibility of conference papers and - later on - adding more conference proceedings, Scopus can be positioned as the best place to find conference material in the context of other relevant scientific literature.
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Conference papers now appear as a separate document type |
Conference papers also appear as a separate document type in the Refine Results box |
4. Further enhancements to the Citation Tracker
The Citation Tracker helps users to track research trends, identify hot topics, trace the influence of an author’s work and evaluate research output.
From November Web 2.0 technology will enable the dynamic citation overview to be instantly generated, with no delay while calculations are being processed in the background.
Users requested the need for more in-depth analysis tools. As part of this focus, Scopus will offer:
5. “Remember me” functionality
“Remember me” functionality will enable users to access Scopus’ personalized features more intuitively by recalling their respective usernames and passwords. It is only necessary to login to Scopus once for the system to retain a user’s personal details for future sessions. Those who do not wish to make use of this feature can simply disable it in "My Profile".
Note that users accessing Scopus on a public pc should remember to log out properly. Exiting the internet browser does not disable the “remember me” functionality.
6. Increased session time
The session time in Scopus has increased to 120 minutes for IP authenticated users. A Scopus session is timed-out after an inactive use for 120 minutes (previously 30 minutes). If a user would like to actively end a session they can log out or just close the browser window.
Content becomes even more current and more precise, while expanded indexing retrieves more results, with:
1. Articles-in-Press
Researchers need to be up-to-date on latest developments in their research area. What’s more up-to-date than an article in early publication stage?
Scopus will be the first Abstract & Citation database to offer articles in pre-publication stage across all subject areas. Users will be able to find journal articles on Scopus prior to its official publication (e.g. prior to assigning a page number). 90% of these so-called Articles-in-Press have abstracts and these will be available on Scopus 1-4 months earlier than the official publication date (depending on the individual title).
An Article-in-Press is not yet the final publication version of an article. It represents an early version which is still subject to insertion of changes and/or corrections by the author or publisher. References of this article might also be impacted by changes and/or corrections. As a result of this, to include the references from Articles-in-Press in Scopus might cause incorrect citation counts for an article. As soon as the article is final, the references will be added to Scopus.
Although initially applied to journals published by Elsevier and Springer/Kluwer Academic, other publishers will start participating in this partnership from 2008.
2. Expanded implementation of controlled index terms
Part of the value add researchers receive from Scopus is the addition of index terms, which improve the recall of a keyword search. With this release, Scopus will further enhance keyword searching by making more index term levels searchable. This will allow for finding even more articles. For example, the MeSH minor headings from MEDLINE and EMTREE mentioned index terms from EMBASE will be searched in a keyword search and displayed on the expanded record page view.
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Index terms in Scopus prior and after release |
Improvements to Scopus Source Browse
When clicking on the Source tab, users will find the following enhancements:
3. New link to journal homepage
Scopus now offers a new pre-resolved link directly to a given journal's homepage. This link will appear on the Source Information page in Scopus, where other relevant information about the journal can be displayed in a single click. This link operates independently of whether or not an end-user is entitled to access full text. Currently, we have links to over 14,000 titles in Scopus. The new link to the journal homepage will support finding more journal information and improves visibility of these titles.
4. Displaying of multiple subject classifications
Scopus will further improve its transparency on Source Browse. Currently, Scopus displays only one subject classification per journal. However, in some cases journals might have several subject areas in which they are classified. All these subject areas were taken into account when searching but not displayed as such. From this release, on the request of both internal and external users, Scopus will show all journal subject classifications on the Source Browse page.
Coming soon...
Scopus is proud to already announce a groundbreaking feature. This feature is a substantive time saver and will be released before year-end.
1. The Scopus Affiliation Identifier
Today a user would spend at least 2 hours to find all the publications of one institution due to checking all the name variants. With the upcoming Scopus Affiliation Identifier a user will find all publications from a single institution in just a few minutes.
Finding all the publications from a single institution is notoriously difficult, just as it is to find all the work belonging to one author. There may be many alternate versions of a name, they are often spelt or recorded differently by individual sources, an institute may change its name on a number of occasions and names of institutes can also be similar to one another. MIT, for example, has more than 1700 name variants in Scopus.
Following the launch of the Scopus Author Identifier early 2006, Scopus will now be the first database to offer its users the ability to identify all the research output belonging to an institution or organization with 99% accuracy and 95% recall. The Scopus Affiliation Identifier increases the accuracy and completeness of search results by automatically matching and de-duplicating institute and organization names. A unique identifier number is assigned to all the affiliations found in Scopus. Documents have been successfully matched to an affiliation through the use of a sophisticated algorithm. Additionally an extensive two tier process of list mapping was required to attain the high levels of data accuracy required by the product.
This new feature will benefit a number of our user communities. Deans, provosts, faculty heads, senior researchers and bibliometricians will be interested in using this feature to make resource allocation decisions. It will help them identify centers of excellence and evaluate collaboration behavior by looking at: who is well cited by subject field in their institute, who they have been cited by, in which fields they have been cited most, and who they have cited most. They can then go on to evaluate and benchmark themselves against other institutes. These types of analyses are growing in importance with the introduction of the RAE (Research Assessment Excise) in the UK and the RQF (Research Quality Framework) in Australia.
Finally, researchers can use this feature to review their own research strengths by evaluating the impact their articles have within the broader perspective of the institute’s complete body of research output. It is important to note that citation behavior varies across subject disciplines which means that when citations are used for evaluation purposes these differences in behavior need to be taken into account.
The Scopus Affiliation Identifier may not perform the analysis for our users but it will save them valuable time in identifying and matching all the work that they need for their evaluation purposes.
The Beta version of the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will be launched by the end of 2007, allowing users to find all the publications. The Beta version will allow users to search from the ‘Search Tab’ and list the results in a simple interface design. The quality of the data in the Beta version and the final version are the same, only the interface functionalities will improve the user’s experience.
In the first half of 2008, the fully fledged version of the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will be launched. It will offer functionalities similar to the Scopus Author Identifier e.g. group unmatched affiliation profiles, affiliation details pages and option to provide feedback.
Scopus is the first major database to systematically attempt the disambiguation of institutions, companies or sponsor organizations; in doing so it will offer its users a unique opportunity to take the guesswork out of affiliation searching.
What does it look like in December 2007 and in full release in 2008?
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In Beta: Affiliation search performed via Basic search tab. The user needs to select ‘Affiliation’ in the search box AND needs to select the affiliations button below the search box |
With final release: Affiliation search performed via Affiliation search tab. No ‘Affiliation’ selection necessary |
Results page:
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In Beta: a simple interface without the refine options. Only number of documents available |
In 2008: Refine results option available |
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In 2008: Affiliation Details page available including including an option to match affiliations and send feedback |
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