Confessions of a User

Hyung-Sun Kim

As a busy professor of postgraduates at the School of Materials and Engineering at Inha University in South Korea, lecturer, peer review and a member of Scopus’ Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), Hyungsun Kim has become quite familiar with the time saving benefits of Scopus.

At the university research lab, Hyungsun’s post-graduate students have been using Scopus since 2005 to research materials science and engineering, focusing mainly on ceramics. Hyungsun enjoys editing works as the Editor-in-Chief of both domestic and international journals, and acts as an editorial board member of several other journals, where he regularly joins the board to evaluate proposals.

We recently caught up with Hyungsun to learn more about his experiences with Scopus. “End users normally utilize Scopus to search information from journals. I see many students and researchers tending to seek new information by using key words, while editors are looking for referee or plagiarism cases,” says Hyungsun.

“Scopus enables an easier reference research from its extensive linkage of journals. With a single, easy click, the user can simply find the original reference of the cited excerpt while reading a journal, and by using the ‘cited by’ tool, can check whether the desired journal has been cited by a different journal.” He continues, “In a similar way, the user can easily search other journals written by the author. Scopus enables the user to effectively find the exact journals and papers in a short amount of time from the pool of references. The system filters specific journals by classifying them based upon the author, publication year, field or the name of the journal.”

When asked about his favorite feature functionality, the ‘show abstract’ button was on top of Hyungsun’s list of favorites. “With ‘show abstract’, after searching there is no need to move on to another page to see the abstract, as I can just click on the button to view the abstract on the same page.”

Hyungsun points out other user friendly features. “I know the number of times a journal has been quoted with the ‘citations received since’ tool, and the ‘search history’ button allows me to refer back to the contents that I had previously searched through.”

Hyungsun completed his Ph.D course at the Imperial College, London, and worked as a researcher at Oxford University. He visited the University of New South Wales in Australia as an international research fellow, and as a result of his varied research experiences, was able to publish a book on how to effectively write scientific papers in Korean.

Hyungsun enjoys lecturing on publication ethics and plagiarism, and is also a regular on the lecture circuit delivering lectures about paper writing techniques.