Librarian’s Top Tips

Using Scopus in innovative research and discovery
An Interview with 3M’s Tom Koehler

Scopus helps companies make the connections that drive discovery and innovation forward and supports critical business decisions. Scopus offers companies such as 3M a starting point for research with its user-friendliness and integration with other services, enabling the corporate library to serve the needs of its researchers in all its different divisions and specialist departments.

3M scientists anticipate what 3M innovation will do for its customers, looking ahead 5 to 10 years, and making these innovations a reality. With locations in over 65 countries around the world, the company's 75,000 people use their expertise, technologies and global strength to lead in major markets.

Recently we caught up with Tom Koehler, a Technical Supervisor within 3M’s Information Research & Solutions (IR&S) department, to learn more about how information is leveraged as a valuable resource for 3M. As leader of the ATLAS Platform and Internal Knowledge Solutions teams for 3M’s global audience, Tom has an eye for effective research workflow tools that add value to the corporate library.

As the first corporate library to purchase access to Scopus, 3M has been a subscriber since Scopus was first launched. With more than 14 years experience working in corporate libraries, Tom’s background in chemistry has helped him to locate and provide pertinent information needed to make business-critical decisions. IR&S is responsible for creating awareness of Scopus within 3M and ensuring users are adequately trained to make effective use of the tool.

Tom explains, “Scopus is used by 3M researchers across the globe who have stated it provides access not only to abstracts from journals all over the world, but also users find the integration of our link resolver, allowing them to immediately link to available article PDFs, to be an indispensible complement to Scopus.”

Tom is a member of 3M’s library management team, with responsibility for the development of workflow solutions used by the company’s scientists including the ATLAS electronic library, 3M technical reports repository, technical skills locator, and management of the 3M technical notebooks center.

When asked about what core benefits and advantages users have enjoyed, Tom replies: “The comprehensiveness of the data and the responsiveness of the Scopus interface definitely create significant time-savings for our researchers, who previously would have had to search multiple databases with less user-friendly interfaces to get close to the results found on Scopus. A value-add for Scopus resides in the simplicity of its search and results interfaces, allowing 3M-ers to spend more time reading relevant research and less time searching for it.”

Tom is aware that relevant research is an expectation of 3M. “We cannot produce innovative results if we’re spending time developing technical solutions to problems which have already been solved by others.” He continues, “In addition, Scopus has been used by our technical R&D community to perform technology trend analysis and to identify whitespace opportunities for 3M. At the end of the day, Scopus is one of our key resources on ATLAS which allows 3Mers to spend more time reading relevant research and less time searching for it.”