Cover Story

Scopus Affiliation Identifier Takes Research to the Next Level

Scopus continues to evolve to meet researchers’ workflow needs, this time with the upcoming launch of the Scopus Affiliation Identifier, becoming the first such tool to identify and match an institute with all its research output. It will be welcome news for deans, provosts, faculty heads, researchers and funding bodies who understand just how difficult and time-consuming this task has been up to now.

Who benefits? Deans, provosts, faculty heads, senior researchers and biblio-metricians will greatly benefit from Scopus’ Affiliation Identifier when they need to identify an institution’s output to make resource allocation. It will help them identify centers of excellence and evaluate collaborative behavior by: Identifying and matching an institution’s name variants; Grouping and quantifying the research output by subject and by institution; Transform a daunting, time consuming task into a simple and quick research process.

Saving valuable time in your research

A user could easily spend hours seeking a particular institution’s publication based on alternate versions of the institution’s name. However, with the launch of the Affiliation Identifier end of April 2008, librarians and end users will easily find all publications from a single institution in just a few minutes.

Using sophisticated algorithms, the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will increase the accuracy and speed of search results by automatically matching and de-duplicating institute and organization names. This is extremely useful because several name versions may exist or may be spelled or recorded differently by individual sources. An institute may also change its name or have a name similar to another institute. Articles published by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, currently carry more than 1,700 name variants.

David Clay is Deputy Head of Academic Liaison and Finance at the University of Liverpool. The Scopus Affiliation Identifier will make it easier for him to compare departments in his own and other universities. “Up until now we have had to employ personnel to carry out this mammoth task. It is both a slow and expensive process. The Scopus Affiliation Identifier will produce the same results in a matter of seconds,” he says.

Decisions based on clarity

For researcher business management services, the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will enable them to evaluate their institute’s complete body of research output with significant time and cost benefits. It will also enable key user groups to make informed funding decisions by allowing them to identify centers of excellence. They can also use it to benchmark themselves against other institutes.

Starting at the beginning of February 2008, a first phase of the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will be launched, within Scopus Labs with users seeing results in a concise overview. Scopus invites users and institutions themselves to provide feedback on the data found in the Scopus Affiliation Identifier via a feedback button in order to pave the way for the final phase to be released targeting end of April. This will help ensure even higher levels of accuracy for the release, which will offer additional functionalities with proven user benefits.

Scopus is driven by the needs of its customers. Following the success of Scopus Author Identifier, launched in 2006, the Scopus Affiliation Identifier is the next step in fulfilling those needs.

“We are delighted to be able to introduce the Scopus Affiliation Identifier to the market,” says Niels Weertman, Director Product Management Scopus “We’ve invested heavily in developing a feature that will deliver significant benefits to our users and this new feature will help chancellors, deans and provosts make resource allocation and strategic planning decisions.”

Scopus is the first major database to disambiguate the naming of institutions, companies or sponsor organizations, thereby eliminating the guesswork out of affiliation searching and saving librarians and researchers hours of their valuable time.

Read the initial announcement here.