Librarian Top Tips

Alison Whiddon
Coordinator, Agreements & E-Licenses, Natural Resources Canada Library – Ottawa

Scopus’ broad multi-disciplinary coverage and Citation Tracker play an important role in government research

Scopus has become the research tool of choice at Natural Resources Canada Library, an amalgamation consisting of Earth Sciences, Forestry & Energy, Metals & Minerals. Scientists at the institute find the easily navigated, broad coverage of Scopus helpful in their field of research and rate the Citation Tracker, noting its listing of citations in an article’s references particularly useful, especially at promotion time.

Alison Whiddon has been with the Natural Resources Canada library since 2001 and is the coordinator of agreements and E-licenses for the amalgamation’s 13 departmental library sites across Canada.

“The library finds the multidisciplinary and multilingual coverage of the database plus the multi-directional aspects of the expanded search and citation search results very helpful,” says Alison. “Broad disciplines can be integrated within a search and alerts and RSS feeds let us know when new or updated information is available.” Users also find the ability to customize such as direct ILL requests and integrated e-journals a nice benefit.

The Natural Resources Canada has been using Scopus since 2005. Users have benefited from the sophistication of the Scopus platform, and the intuitive, easy-to-use interface. “A challenge of the Natural Resources Canada amalgamation is balancing the goals of meeting client needs with various resources and finding budgetary efficiencies.” Alison continues, “Scopus has helped us do that. One of the best things about Scopus is that it is an affordable multidisciplinary database which is constantly updated not only in its content, but also with enhanced features such as the Affiliation Identifier.”