Confessions of a User

Elsevier Editorial System User Enthusiastic About Scopus
Helps Reduce Workload Significantly

The Elsevier Editorial System (EES) is an online submission and peer-review system, which enables authors to submit articles online, reviewers to review online and editors to manage the whole peer-review process. Elsevier is developing EES to become a complete editorial and peer-review management workbench for its editors, for example by integrating with Scopus for editors and reviewers, automatic science-specific Internet searches via Scirus and in the future, by directly linking through to the full-text articles on ScienceDirect.

We recently spoke to the Managing Editor (ME) of Elsevier’s journal, Materials Science & Engineering B: Advanced Functional Solid-State Materials (MSEB) about how Scopus supports her work.

MSEB’s Editorial Office processes more than 3,000 papers submitted each year, 1,200 of which must be sent out for peer-review. Although EES goes a long way towards streamlining this labor-intensive process, the task of identifying two reviewers – and locating accurate contact information – per paper is still time consuming and poses a number of challenges. Using databases and web sources was extremely frustrating, according to the ME. She often encountered outdated affiliations and the lack e-mail addresses resulted in spending much time and energy on this part of her job. Tracking down information made her feel like a detective…. Until Scopus.

As of March 2006, Scopus has been integrated in EES. Elsevier’s 7,000 editors enjoy unlimited access to Scopus, while Elsevier's network of 200,000 reviewers receives 30-day access to further support them during the peer-review process.
Since the ME has been using Scopus through EES, the time it takes her to identify and contact high-quality reviewers has been reduced by 95%. In her own words, “What used to take hours, now only takes me about ten minutes. It was like flipping a switch.”

Taking advantage of Scopus’ powerful Author Identifier, Citation Tracker and internal linking functionalities, she’s not only able to find highly suitable reviewers, but also gets quicker and usually positive responses to her reviewing requests owing in large part to the accuracy of the contact information in Scopus. With the recent introduction of the h-index in Scopus, she intends to use this metric to help her better evaluate a researcher’s body of published work.

Working in Materials Science can be problematic simply because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field itself. Information can be scattered across many different subject areas including chemistry, physics, engineering, computer science and biomedicine. Scopus, an all-science database, cuts across discipline boundaries and provides broader access to information than a subject-specific niche database.

“Faster DSL! Fast new computer! Advanced software! Nothing saves me time like using Scopus!” commented the ME. “Locating two reviewers for each of the over 700 manuscripts, and never using the same reviewer twice in the same year is not only amazing but extremely gratifying. With Scopus, my time and stress level have been dramatically reduced.”

In addition to finding reviewers, Scopus helps the ME streamline many other aspects of her job: Searching for previously published articles by the same author or group of authors to monitor for possible copyright infringements Confirming that the work described in a submitted paper presents a new or novel approach, one of the editorial missions of MSEB Identifying potential authors for thematic or symposia issues when sending out a call for papers Studying the trends in emerging subject areas Comparing the current aims and scope of MSEB with citation patterns to see if a shift has occurred Finding out who is citing MSEB and how individual papers and issues have performed

The ME concluded, “A lot of my frustration has been eliminated by using Scopus. I am constantly surprised by all the different ways Scopus helps make my job and life easier. Anyone experiencing Scopus just once will be pleasantly surprised and hooked for life.”

Click here for more information about how Scopus supports the scholarly publishing process for Elsevier editors and reviewers.

Coming Soon!

Tighter workflow integration between Scopus and the Elsevier Editorial System (EES)
To further improve Scopus’ integration in editors’ and reviewers’ workflow, Scopus will offer a new linking service with Elsevier Editorial System (EES) linking from references in manuscripts to records in Scopus. This will make it easier and more efficient for editors and reviewers to check references as they will no longer have to log in and out of two platforms, but able to navigate seamlessly from EES to Scopus and ScienceDirect.