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Cover Story
Scopus Content Strategy: What Makes Scopus Tick?
At the heart of Scopus is its content. It is thanks to this core base of peer-reviewed literature, conference proceedings and trade publications in combination with quality sources from the web, that Scopus is Scopus.
To secure its future, the mission of Scopus content mission is defined as:
- Offering the broadest and most current collection of world-class journal content in Science, Technology, Medicine and Social Sciences – enriched with high-quality regional sources and relevant non-journal material;
- Communicating the value of Scopus content in a transparent way;
- Supporting Scopus as a research database and Scopus as a research performance measurement (RPM) tool to become the preferred solution for researchers and librarians
With this mission in mind and content as the heart of Scopus, an optimal performance of the content, like with any heart, is essential to let Scopus grow as a research database and as a RPM tool. This means regularly taking a very close look at what users need and want and determining the best ways to obtain that content for inclusion in the database.
Preparing to take the next step…
Since its inception, the development of Scopus has always been a collaborative process and so it continues today. The Scopus team underwent an extensive exercise to find out what exactly its users want or require from Scopus content by an extensive market research amongst 220 librarians and 1,000 end users.
In addition to that, the Scopus team also organized extensive discussions with many development partners, customers and Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) members.
All parties were presented with several content options varying from adding data elements, such as acknowledgements, to extending pre- and or post-1996 coverage of journals. Examining the responses of the research and the interviews shows a clear focus on options that are extending timelines of Scopus content coverage and searching facilities.
Mapping the way forward…
With these results, Scopus was able to finalize its content plans for 2007 and 2008 by prioritizing the following three areas for content expansion and is already moving ahead aggressively with these initiatives.
Priority #1: Continue backfilling pre-1996 and post-1996 content
Building for the future sometimes means taking a step backwards. One of the first projects Scopus is working on is expanding coverage of abstracts prior to 1996 by focusing on specific subject areas and highly cited journals, e.g. Science, next to the extensive archive loading initiative that was announced earlier this year.
In addition, journals as well as book series in Scopus, that have a later start date than 1996, will be backfilled to 1996 prioritized according to scientific relevance, usage and price.
Priority #2: Sharpen focus on journal content
Scopus’ rich coverage of regional content is regarded by users and librarians as its competitive advantage. Every year, all suggestions from end users are evaluated by the CSAB to ensure the database adequately reflects the world’s scientific research output and offers its users the best quality available.
With a 300% increase of title suggestions between 2005 and 2006, it is important to continuously improve our selection policy. As per user demand, Scopus will focus in 2007 and 2008 to further increase transparency of this process by indicating more qualitative criteria for example non-journal content. New also in this strategy is to track coverage of all titles based on Scopus usage statistics. Titles that have low usage throughout the first years will be considered for de-selection.
Priority #3: Expand coverage of conference proceedings
Scopus currently covers approximately 500 conference proceedings. Users indicate that they would like to be able to search conference papers separately. This option will significantly improve the usability of conference proceedings. In the next release, it will be possible to limit your search to conference papers in the basic search form and in the Refine Results section.
In addition, the market research and interviews point out that in certain subject areas, for example computer science, crucial research is presented at conferences, whereas in other subject areas researchers would always try to publish relevant research in a peer-reviewed journal rather than only in conference proceeding. Therefore, the content strategy will focus on expanding conference proceeding coverage to selected subject areas in close consultation with the CSAB.
What makes Scopus tick...
This new strategy further strengthens content as the heart of Scopus. By making these changes and sharpening our focus, Scopus anticipates users’ needs and avoids gaps in our content offering. At the end of the day, it’s the content that makes Scopus tick.
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Visit the Scopus Info site for additional information about our content coverage policies.
Ongoing content initiatives:
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