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Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Library chooses Scopus to track its authors’ publications

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), one of the world's foremost cancer research and treatment institutes, has recently partnered with Scopus to track its surgery department’s author publication history; enabling the evaluation of their citation information across the broadest range of research content available.

The partnership was formed to evaluate the research activity of MSKCC authors using quantitative and qualitative measures. A task force extracted articles authored by the 86 members of the surgery department using more than 280 name variants associated with multiple affiliations. To help in the evaluation process, Ulrich's Guide to Periodicals and current Impact Factors from Thomson Scientific’s Journal Citation Reports were used.

JoAnne Sparks, Director of Library Services and Donna Gibson, Associate Director of User Services, considered a number of ways to approach this daunting task before turning to Elsevier and the Scopus database. “Scopus helped us to understand how our researchers are changing the world and enabled us to provide them with the tools to help them explore this on their own.”

JoAnne continues, “The Author Identifier, a real-time citation data tracking tool, both helped to systematically review the impact of MSKCC publications within the medical community and track trends over time.”

Donna Gibson, Associate Director of User Services, comments, "We were astounded by the Scopus
results. We discovered that members of the surgery department are actively publishing in 852 journals, representing a significantly broader and more diverse range of titles thanwe had originally anticipated.” She continues, “The next surprise was that 227 of these titles, more than 25%, do not have Impact Factors. Many of these were applied medical, clinical and surgical journals, international titles and state medical association journals.”

MSKCC also discovered that while Impact Factors are certainly widely used and generally accepted as an indicator to rank and evaluate journals, they only provide a piece of the puzzle. Other indicators like the h-index should also be taken into consideration when carrying out research performance analysis since this metric considers the individual author’s research output. This indicator can easily be found in Scopus by sorting the author’s articles by descending citations and noting where the article rank and the citation count cross.

The publication lists retrieved from Scopus were sent to the authors for review and feedback and any modification required then forwarded to Elsevier to update the Scopus database. Kimberly Hill, Senior Product Manager, Library Technology Initiatives at MSKCC, states: "We understand that this is an organic and collaborative process. Elsevier welcomes feedback from its user base as they are passionate about improving their product."

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to further analysis of the Scopus data, MSKCC Library's future plans include using the results of the study as a collection development tool. Examining the journals in which their authors publish will help determine which journals they want to maintain in their collection. They also plan to set up unique RSS feeds in Scopus to alert the library community to new publications.