insideScopus :: 5 :: Confessions of a Librarian

Scopus empowers me and the end users at KRIBB

Sang-Jun Kim, Senior Librarian at KRIBB (Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology) talks about giving his users the “Scopus advantage".

“We are very pleased to be using Scopus here at the KRIBB,” says Sang-Jun Kim. “Of course it is a very extensive and powerful bibliographic database covering all of science. But it also provides us with effective tools to track and manage articles published by our staff and analyze research trends. I really appreciate the user-friendliness of the Scopus interface compared to other databases."

Easy management of staff research output
Mr. Kim is now using the Scopus alerting service to identify his staff's recent papers. By registering his e-mail alert using his affiliation name, he receives automatic notification of his researchers' latest article information via e-mail. Mr. Kim recounts that, "Before I used Scopus, I had to rely on our end users to receive their research output, so it's quite difficult to maintain the currency and precision of our internal output management system. But now using Scopus, I find out about our center's recent papers even before the authors. In addition, using the Scopus RSS service, our center's recent research output is now automatically displayed on the library homepage, so it is quite helpful to raise our end users’ awareness of Scopus and to actively promote our library service.”

Credibility of Scopus, providing powerful citation information
"I read some articles about Scopus being a very suitable tool for identifying the best articles and analyzing current research trends. So I decided to carry out some research of my own. In January 2007 I executed an interesting investigation of 1,187 articles written by our KRIBB researchers between 2003 and 2005. Based on this investigation I recognized that Scopus offers exceptional coverage and citation tracking. I have become a strong advocate of Scopus to our end users."

Convenient analysis of research trends
Scopus is very useful for research trend analysis, providing quantitative statistical information. “I am very glad to know and share with my researchers the unlimited capabilities of Scopus citation analysis,” indicated Mr. Kim. “Although I am not a subject librarian, I can provide a quick overview of the key authors and key journals in a researcher’s area of interest, and beyond that I can even provide a good citation overview that reports how often the selected documents have been cited since 1996. So my expectations of Scopus are continuously growing.”