insideScopus :: 1 :: Neils Weertman on the new Citation Tracker

Niels heads up the Scopus product management team in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and is responsible for taking your suggestions and prioritizing them for development. His picture suggests dynamism and it's true: not only does he keep the development of Scopus moving but he regularly runs marathons and has achieved some enviable times.

The Scopus Citation Tracker is the culmination of six months’ observation of how researchers use the citation data in Scopus. We noticed that everyone liked to sort results by the highest-cited article but when we investigated further with approximately 150 researchers and librarians, it became apparent that users wanted to take that data and manipulate it in a variety of ways to get further insight. They told us that instead of downloading numerous messy datasets after multiple different searches, it would be nice to have a tool that calculated it all for them, where they could choose which articles were included and then visually analyze trends.

We conducted even more research than usual for the Scopus Citation Tracker (we asked the 150 researchers to log each step every time they used the Citation Tracker prototype) and it’s interesting to see what they found most useful.

as a matter of fact:

Every time a Citation Tracker overview table is requested, 270 million references are scanned and sorted in real-time.
90% of the overview tables are calculated and displayed in less than two seconds.
The Citation Tracker utilizes the processing power of 10 servers and takes up approximately 700 gigabytes of storage.

The Citation Tracker can generate an overview for any selection of up to 550 documents.
Articles from any of the 15,000+ Scopus journals can be selected for analysis in the Citation Tracker.

Project managers; engineers; architects; interface designers and data analysts. Approximately 40 technical people at Elsevier have worked on building the Citation Tracker.
More than 150 users and librarians logged their use of the Citation Tracker over three months before it was ready for launch.

Results of one of the questions in the Citation Tracker study with 150 researchers and librarians

The study concluded that the two main research needs the Citation Tracker addresses are:

To assess a research area to see if it’s an active field worthy of entering or pursuing.
To evaluate an individual author to help decide whether they would be suitable and relevant to work with, employ, grant funds to, review a manuscript or whether they might be a “rising star” to keep an eye on.

the Citation Tracker's overview table

But enough from me. You and your users have had access to the Citation Tracker for a couple of months already and I’m keen to learn what you think so far, so keep your comments and suggestions coming via feedback@scopus.com.