Confessions of a user

Scopus provides practical assistance to Associate Dean

Scopus users span a range of job responsibilities and information retrieval requirements. To gain insights into researchers’ information needs, we spoke with Professor Jörg-Rüdiger Sack of Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

In any given week, Professor Sack, a devoted Scopus user, typically works within his own university, with national committees in Canada and with international groups around the world.

As Associate Dean (Research), he is often called on to evaluate the work of others, for example when reviewing fellowship applications to provide seed funding for new faculty members. The criteria for these fellowships include scientific merit, qualifications of the applicant and potential for attracting outside funding. Since these candidates come from different disciplines, Professor Sack finds that the tools available in Scopus, like the Citation Tracker and Author Identifier, make his evaluations easier.

“Publication and citation information is considered one of the most valid indicators of research output and quality. Scopus provides us with data that directly supports the university funding allocation decision process.” Professor Sack continues, “Scopus makes it easy to collect and analyze this data. It helps me track researchers’ output, identify their collaborators and competitors, track important publications and look at the impact of their work across the scientific community. It provides an additional metric by helping us qualitatively and quantitatively assess whether a candidate should be considered for one of our fellowships.”

“I used Scopus to determine the number of publications and of citations from a specific researcher. I wanted to know where these citations originate, for example, from close collaborators or otherwise. Reading the abstracts of papers that appeared to be influential provided additional insights, and in some cases, where I wanted to go deeper into the papers, it was easy to link directly to the full text.”

Professor Sack also found Scopus very useful in preparing for committee meetings at the DFG (German Research Council) Excellence Initiative.

"It's evident that what Scopus has to offer benefits our entire academic community, from administrators, faculty, researchers and students to librarians and information specialists.”