Letter from the Editor

Dear Librarian,

Welcome to the fourth edition of inside Scopus. This issue, introduced by Scopus Director Jaco Zijlstra, takes a look back at 2006 and highlights some of the major enhancements that took place plus gives you a glimpse of some of the exciting developments planned for this year. Our priorities remain the same - using our user-centered design approach to develop content, enhance functionality and add more evaluation capabilities - in order to support researchers' workflow.

From the very beginning Scopus development has been a consultative process. Building relationships with the library and end user communities has been instrumental in shaping Scopus. Julie Arnheim, Princeton University librarian, talks about Scopus content and the activities of the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board on which she serves. Jim Robertson, Director of University Web Services at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recounts how the local development of a Scopus RSS feed led to the introduction of a new Scopus feature that helps increase usage. Professor Jörg- Rüdiger Sack, Associate Dean, Carleton University, Canada, discusses how he has successfully employed Scopus to deal with some of the information challenges that he – and the majority of his peers – may face on a daily basis.

Recently eighteen Scopus Development Partners representing librarians and end users around the world joined us at a Colloquium held in San Diego, to talk about the future direction of Scopus. Discussions were frank and lively and both the Partners and the Scopus Product Management team gained valuable insights not only regarding Scopus, but also on broader issues concerning the evolving role of abstracting and indexing databases. Dr. Jorge Hirsch spoke to the group about his development of the Hirsch Index (H-Index), a metric used to quantify the effect of an individual’s scientific research output. The metric can already be found at the author level in Scopus by sorting the author’s articles on descending citations. This spring, however, Scopus will enable users to see the metric instantaneously.

As always, I welcome your views on Scopus and your ideas on how we can continue to develop our communication with you. Please contact me via inside@scopus.com with your questions and suggestions.

Ulrika Nordlöf
Editor-in-chief
inside@scopus.com