Who's Who

Jay Katzen, Managing Director, Academic and Government Products, Science and Technology Division

Inside Scopus recently caught up with Jay Katzen, Managing Director, Academic and Government Products, Science and Technology Division. Jay’s key responsibilities are overseeing the product management, product marketing and business development for the core platforms that deliver Elsevier content: Scopus, ScienceDirect, Scirus and the research workflow team.

Jay is no stranger to the information publishing world, bringing more than 18 years of experience in the industry to Elsevier. He most recently served as the senior vice president of marketing, business development and knowledge management in the Healthcare Point of Care unit within The Thomson Corporation. Before this position, he held the roles of Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Unbound Medicine, and Lexi-Comp, Inc. Jay is in fact a native of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with a B.S. in computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University and an M.B.A. from Cleveland State University in the United States.

When asked what his vision is for the future of these product offerings, he explains: “My goal is to make sure we have a deep and broad understanding of our customers so we not only build the most innovative and intuitive products that improve outcomes for our customers, but also provide solutions that go beyond our traditional markets and buyers”. He continues by describing how the products help users work more efficiently and effectively in today’s information-crowded society. “Take our new collaborative research tools Scirus Topic Pages and 2collab, as an example, they allow researchers to share ideas and build communities online. This is especially important given the current need for information literacy.”

It is clear that researchers are under more scrutiny and face more intense time pressures. Jay continues to explain that it is important to consistently assess new innovative technology to see how they can improve the users’ research experience. According to Jay, Scopus has been embracing these challenges with open arms by introducing functionality like the Scopus Author Identifier, the Citation Tracker and RSS feeds. In fact, Scopus is currently preparing to launch both the Affiliation Identifier and the document download manager with both tools saving researchers’ valuable time.

Just as the Scopus Author Identifier has proved itself as a worthy tool in helping to identify and group all the work belonging to one author, the Scopus Affiliation Identifier will prove itself as a tool to identify and group all the work belonging to one institute. These two particular features may be geared towards specialised user groups; however, the document download manager will benefit everyone.

Instead of downloading one specified full text article in five clicks, users will be able to download 50 full text articles at once in just two clicks. These are impressive results that have set an industry precedence. Despite this, Jay would like to push these results even further. He sees an opportunity to enhance the user’s experience by getting even closer to individual user groups and building on the existing understanding of their needs.

Beyond leading the group towards further enhancing its solutions based offerings, Jay enjoys spending time with his family of five with whom he recently relocated to the Netherlands. However, despite having left the states behind, his love for sports, in particular American football continues.