Jaco Zijlstra looks back at Scopus 2006 and shares his vision for 2007

Jaco Zijlstra leads Scopus as Director with responsibility for Product Development & Sales for both Scopus and Scirus. Jaco joined Elsevier in 1990 and has held management positions on a number of innovative electronic publishing initiatives in Amsterdam, New York and Singapore. In 2002 he assumed the directorship of Scopus, which was launched in 2004 and has become a well-respected new business with a strong client base.

What’s so special about Scopus? I think Scopus’ uniqueness stems from a single overriding goal: to directly support researchers’ daily workflow in the literature search process. All Scopus’ content, features and functionalities are designed to free up researchers’ time and build new insights so they can get about the business of doing research. And the only way to accomplish this is to really listen to what users have to say. Scopus will continue to be shaped collaboratively with Elsevier, our Development Partners, the Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) and our users. All of these parties have already helped to springboard the development of several of the most significant Scopus enhancements. In 2006 the successful launches of the Scopus Citation Tracker, the Scopus Author Identifier, WebCites and PatentCites were all a product of this continual discourse. And it’s certainly gratifying to our partners, advisors and users to see how many of their needs have been addressed within Scopus.

The backbone of any database is, of course, its content, and it is Scopus’ breadth of coverage that really makes it the most comprehensive database on the market – made up of over 15,000 titles including more than 13,000 peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, since Scopus includes open access journals, book series, quality web sources and patents, it is the logical destination from which researchers can launch comprehensive searches across multiple sources within one single interface.

It is not only the inclusion of these content types that has pleased our users, but also the continuing attention to completeness and currency. From 1996 onwards Scopus offers the most complete content available with over 99% completeness. It provides researchers with the assurance that they can rely on what they find.

Looking ahead to 2007
Scopus as a developing window on contemporary research

At the third Scopus ''Content Selection and Advisory Board'' (CSAB) meeting in Lisbon, October 2006, the emphasis was on expanding content in breadth and in depth to further match the needs of the global research community. The CSAB is currently evaluating more than 1,000 candidate titles for inclusion in the Scopus journal collection, many of which are published in South America and the Asia Pacific region. Thus far 530 journals have passed the stringent content selection procedure and will be added to Scopus from 2007 onwards. All of these titles will benefit end users by providing additional global research coverage in a broad range of fields, such as biomedicine and social sciences.

Scopus covers the last eleven years of scientific research making it the best contemporary research tool at your researcher’s fingertips. In addition to providing the best contemporary coverage we have also turned our attention to pre- 1996 records. We embarked on a major initiative in 2006; the loading of retrospective content, particularly in subject areas where older materials are used more regularly. During 2007 this ambitious program will add millions of records to Scopus in chemistry, mathematics, physics, engineering and the social sciences. This will complement the existing 15 million pre-1996 records that focus on life sciences and medicine. Agreements have already been signed with leading publishers and societies including Springer, the Nature Publishing Group, the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics to source this older material.

Scopus is a tremendously rich source of content. I’m pleased to report that there are many exciting developments on the horizon with an emphasis on building research performance indicators based on the wealth of data within Scopus. Today, the importance of advanced bibliometric analysis is widely acknowledged for a variety of tasks within the academic community. Among these are assessing research performance, supporting grant writing, funding allocations, tenure and promotions, and monitoring interdisciplinary scientific developments.

We have partnered with bibliometric development specialists to ensure that this new set of tools integrates seamlessly into researchers’ workflow, providing relevant, accurate, and above all, useful data to address information needs that arise on a daily basis. And I am pleased to report that the ability to generate these tools as well as their graphic visualization will be launched in Scopus this year.

Finally, I would like to use this forum to publicly thank our Development Partners, CSAB members, the library community and our users for their overwhelming support of Scopus.