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What's new?
Scopus' enhancements
Coming Soon!
Scopus API
RSS and HTML Feeds
Scopus’ enhancements on the Horizon: New Features, New Functionality, New Content
Scopus is designed to support the scientific literature research process and the substantive new features, functionality and content that are coming users’ way in the next few weeks will do just that.
Introducing new features that make Scopus even easier to use to search for and find information:
- Expanding relevant results through easy browsing of cited references
Exploration of cited references is an important part of the literature research process as it enables users to find results in the articles’ references that are outside the scope of the database such as books, thesis and older articles, yet can contain critical information.
Two new features will make exploration of cited references in Scopus more efficient and effective.
- For every search the user will see an additional results tab, showing references that match the user’s query: these are the results from the references section in Scopus’ documents and not covered by Scopus as such. As a result it will be easier to locate relevant results within the approximately 50 million additional references and, wherever possible, link through to the full-text result.
- Users will now be able to view all de-duplicated cited references for a set of documents, all in a single overview. This will help users find related documents based on both backward and forward citations easier.
These features will enable users to extend their searches across unlinked Scopus references and retrieve relevant documents that may be missed otherwise. It also enhances the continuity of the citation chain, which in turn helps the user find related documents based on citations.
- More and flexible clustering categories
Already extremely popular with users, the Refine Results feature will be further enhanced with the addition of the following categories: language of the full-text article, publication type, article-level keywords and affiliation name when available (See Coming Soon! section below). This allows users to more effectively deal with search results and easily pinpoint the information they are looking for. In addition, users will be able to customize which dimensions they wish to have displayed. - Further enhancements to Scopus Citation Tracker
The Citation Tracker helps users to track research trends, identify hot topics, track the influence of an author’s work and evaluate research output. The upcoming enhancements give users more insights into citation behaviour and increase the usability of the Citation Tracker in the following ways:
- In addition to the existing single author’s self-citation exclusion, it will become possible to exclude all instances of one of the authors citing themselves. This will help users to gain insight into the number of citations an article or a set of articles has received outside the co-author network.
- Web 2.0 technology will enable the dynamic citation overview to be instantly generated instead of having to wait for all calculations to be finalized. Also, the journal ISSN will be added the export function to provide more data elements useful in citation tracking. - ‘Remember me’ functionality
Increasing Scopus’ ease of use, “remember me” functionality will enable able users to more intuitively access Scopus’ personalized features by remembering end users’ username and password.
Content becomes even more current and more precise indexing makes retrieval more accurate
- Articles in Press coming to Scopus
Through the addition of Articles in Press to Scopus users will be able to find relevant journal articles on Scopus prior to the publication of the full journal volume/issue. As a result abstracts will be available on Scopus several weeks earlier.
Although initially applied to journals published by Elsevier and Springer/Kluwer Academic other publishers will start participating in this partnership shortly afterwards. - Expanded implementation of controlled index terms
Part of the value add researchers receive from Scopus are the addition of index terms, which improve recall of a keyword search. In November, Scopus will further enhance keyword searching by making more index terms levels searchable and displayable. The minor MeSH headings will be searched in a keyword search and displayed on the expanded record page view, for example.
Taking the guess work out of affiliation searching …
Finding all publications from a single institution is hampered by the same problems as finding all publications from a single author: an institution’s name is spelled differently in different sources - MIT has more than 1700 spelling variants across all documents in Scopus - and institutions’ names can be very similar.
Following the launch of the Author Identifier in May 2006, Scopus is busy matching articles based on affiliations with unprecedented levels of completeness and accuracy.
The first step, affiliation searching is planned to be incorporated in December 2007!
Once available, users will gain full advantage by finding all publications from a single affiliation - despite numerous names and spelling variants - with only one single search.
Scopus is taking the guesswork out of affiliation searching. More information coming your way soon …
Commercial availability of 2collab
2collab is a free social bookmarking site where users will be able to store and organize their favorite Internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups they will be able to decide to share their bookmarks with others.
For customers of Elsevier’s databases, 2collab provides their users with a collaboration tool that will support them in many aspects of their workflow, for example, networking with other experts in their specialist areas, finding and evaluating new research materials as a community, working together on analyzing information to uncover new challenges and find solutions and getting peer feedback on research they have published.
This service will be open to any user; a Scopus or ScienceDirect license is not required. Click here for the expanded 2collab feature in the As a Matter of Fact section of this issue.
Scopus API
Enhance Your Web Application with Scopus Content
Interested in integrating Scopus results into your own website? SCAPI makes this possible...
SCAPI, or Scopus Application Program Interface (API), enables you to search and select Scopus data elements and create your own mashups. The API returns Scopus data in a format that is easily integrated into an application or your website. Click here to register your own Scopus API.
Here’s a simple Mashup example to illustrate how the Scopus API can be applied in combination with Google maps. The map visualizes the publishers’ geographic location of the 20 most highly cited articles in Scopus per subject area available in the drop down menu.
Contact us at api@scopus.com for any feedback and mashup proposals.
RSS and HTML Feeds
Powered by Scopus, Empowering Your Site
Benefit from the RSS and HTML feeds that Scopus has developed for you. The RSS feeds enable you to easily monitor your Scopus queries in any of your feed aggregator and stay up to date with the research community. The Scopus HTML feed allows you to showcase the latest – or most highly cited publications from your institution directly on your website (with your own ‘look and feel’). You can even include citation counts in the display. Feeds within your site offer your users a quick way to review the latest published articles in Scopus that match their search criteria.
All feeds will be updated automatically and link directly to a result page in Scopus. Scopus offers feeds for:
- Document searches
- Citation searches
- Related documents searches (shared references)
Feed suggestions:
- The 10 most recent articles published by a University
- The 5 most recent citations of an article
- The 20 most recent articles in Scopus in a subject area
Take a look at a few HTML Feeds Examples to see how institutions like yours are using RSS and HTML feeds.
3 easy steps to set up a Scopus RSS & HTML Feed
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We invite you to download the Step-by-Step Guide on the HTML Feeds integration.
And click here for information on the Scopus Integration Program.
