Top Tracking Tips from: Haymwantee

Haymwantee is a Reference Librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA. When she is not busy teaching students the benefits of using a structured database over the Web, she is giving family and friends tips on the horses and is sure to be seen accompanying her husband to all the best horse-racing events.

The Scopus Citation Tracker can yield great insight into research due to its association with two other important Scopus features – ‘cited by’ and ‘results summary’. NJIT was a test partner for developing the citation tracker and through my experience of that testing process there are several questions I heard from researchers and faculty that the citation tracker answers for them more easily:

As a student:

• Which institutions should I apply to?
• Which professors can teach me the most in my field?

As a researcher:

• Who are/were the major contributors to a particular breakthrough? Who are the most important researchers in my field and which institutions are they from?
• In which journals were my articles cited, by whom and how many times?
• What does my publishing contribution look like over time?
• Are there any other research groups working on my theory?
• Did my research cross disciplines?
• Is this still an active field?
• Where are most articles in my field published? For example, did my area of research shift to another part of the globe and what are the key resources I should read to keep up-to-date?
• What is currently known about my field of research and is my idea original enough to be granted funding?

As an administrator:

• Which applicant should I hire for a faculty post, researcher or graduate student? How well-known is this person and should I hire him/her?
• Is this faculty member an eligible candidate for tenure?

As an editor:

• Who is the most relevant reviewer?
• How influential is the submitting author?
• Which researchers should I be attracting to publish in my journal?

Last but not least! As a librarian:

• Which journals does our faculty publish in and in which journals has our faculty been cited most? For example, which new/other/different journals should the library be subscribing to?

In conclusion, our users at NJIT tell me that the Scopus Citation Tracker makes it so much easier to evaluate instantly what and who is important, and predict what and who may become important in the future. They can rate themselves against other research groups and even use it to help with the tenure and hiring process. As a librarian, if you are asked any of the questions above – I recommend you show them the Scopus Citation Tracker, they’ll love you for it.