Tefko Saracevic: Confessions of a user

Tefko is a member of the Library and Information Science faculty at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA and is also Associate Dean of their School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. As well as being a bit of a guru on finding information, he has become rather skilled at unearthing the best freebies from the many exhibits and conferences he speaks at. This, as far as his grandchildren are concerned, makes him the best grandfather ever.

I am using Scopus wearing several different hats: as a researcher, a professor/teacher, a student advisor, and an Editor-in-Chief of an international journal. Each hat results in differing uses. The Citation Tracker has substantially enhanced all of them. Here are some of my experiences under the researcher hat in which indeed the Citation Tracker proved helpful.

My field happens to be Information Science and presently I am working on a comprehensive critical review about scholarly advances that covers among other things, “lines and progress of inquiry and key contributions, authors, and trends”. The Citation Tracker is ready-made for such work, for example:

• I used it to identify time trends for different topics. As within many other research areas, specific topics tend to grow and decline like an epidemic. I traced these in the tracker’s overview table of citation patterns, to see their activity. Some topics were quite active, others were dormant.
• I also identified key contributions and authors and traced what I call their ‘scholarly genealogy’. What authors and works are connected? What are the major connections? I found their ‘scholarly children’, ‘scholarly grandchildren’ and even some distant and surprising relatives. One can easily and delightfully get lost in the scholarly genealogical maze.

Through citation tracking I found stuff that I would otherwise not find searching subject indexes alone. But subject-searching and citation-tracking beautifully complement each other. In the process, I constructed and analyzed three kinds of tracking overview tables: for given works, given topics, and given authors.

Of course, in the last category I also constructed a vanity overview table, for myself. It is even better than ‘googling’ your own name. Sometimes a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.