Science And Technology

Focus on the scope

Scopus ™ content coverage announced.

Amsterdam, 25 June 2004 -Covering over 14,000 scientific, technical, medical and social sciences titles from 4,000 publishers by its commercial launch scheduled for Q4 2004, Scopus is set to be the largest single Abstract and Indexing (A&I) database ever built. More comprehensive than any other single existing A&I database, Scopus will offer cross-discipline access to more than 27 million abstracts and citations, stretching back to 1966, including cited references from 1996 onwards. Research has shown that 86% of the usage of reference backfiles has been within the last 10 years. Covering a truly global selection of high quality titles, users will be able to access more European and Asia Pacific literature than is covered in any other single A&I database. Scopus links citing and cited documents forwards and backwards in time, occupying hundreds of gigabytes of electronic storage.

But Scopus isn't just big numbers. Working in partnership with librarians across the world, every stage of Scopus’ development has been guided by the zeal to ensure all relevant scientific information is presented to researchers. Jaco Zijlstra, Director of Scopus, believes this will be apparent to every user. “Content is nothing without control. Scopus is the perfect blend. Intuitive search and browse functionality means users will at last be able to query a single, comprehensive database without worrying that they will miss something.”

All science, from one single entry point

A team of expert content managers scoured relevant resources in the STM community for inclusion. The selection of titles was driven by user demand and intensive market research by the Scopus team to ensure the highest quality literature was included. Other criteria include peer review and timeliness of publication, as well as a desire to ensure that Open Access and electronic only titles are well represented. Titles from over 4,000 international publishers are covered by Scopus, which is updated daily. Harriet Bell, Senior Marketing Manager with Scopus, commented, “Early on in our market research process, we were struck by the fact that even within one article, many of the references cited literature across different disciplines. One of the greatest strengths of Scopus is that you can actually click on those references to view the record or go to the full text. Scientists told us of their frustration when trying to evaluate and manage huge quantities of information, both within and adjacent to their own fields of study using currently available databases. Scopus is designed to make that a problem of the past. ”

Making the most of libraries’ investments

Links to full-text articles from such a huge body of abstract and indexing content is proving to be a major advantage for libraries with a development version of Scopus installed at their sites. Jeff Wisniewski, Web Services Librarian with Pittsburgh University outlined how Scopus increased usage of his libraries resources. "The full text linking capability available in Scopus has vastly expanded full text availability for our end users, so much so that several of our largest resources have seen increases in full text retrievals of over 500%. It's satisfying for us to see our investment in full text paying big dividends, and has enabled us to fulfill, to a greater extent than ever before, researchers' desires for an innovative and intuitive discovery tool backed by a near seamless universe of full text content."

Accuracy is key

But just as important as the size of the Scopus database is its accuracy. Scopus has a team of dedicated professionals who ensure that the data is standardised, cleaned and de-duplicated. To do this they use cutting-edge technology to eliminate data inconsistencies and ensure that over 99% of citing references and cited articles are matched precisely. From running a click-and-go search on Scopus, scientists can view the most accurate and up-to-date citation counts for published articles. “Elsevier has been building online databases for more than 30 years. Scopus has benefited from this heritage and represents the culmination of years of experience, as well as the backfile content from these databases. We know that the quality and precision of Scopus through extensive and continuous data improvement and clean-up will be extremely high,” asserts Eefke Smit, Managing Director of ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases at Elsevier.

The inclusion of CAS registry numbers from the CAS registry file, MeSH terms (from MEDLINE) and EMTREE medical terms (from EMBASE), is supplemented by a team of trained indexers who add key terms to records where not supplied by the author. This enables any researcher to pinpoint relevant literature with ease. By combining the structure that the Scopus team has added with an interface that is extremely easy to use, Scopus can exploit the power of specialist searching without the user needing to have expert knowledge.

Adding the best of the Web

In addition to its impressive A&I coverage, Scopus has integrated Scirus, the search engine for the scientific Internet, to deliver the best of the Web to researchers. Scirus opens up access to over 167 million pages of relevant scientific information on the Web, including author home pages, university sites, corporate information, and other resources such as Cogprints, Computer Science Preprint Server, Mathematics Preprint Server and ArXiv.org, OAI compliant resources, the world intellectual property organisation, plus the US, Japanese and European Patent Offices. Jaco Zijlstra concludes, “Our commitment is to get Scopus users to relevant information wherever it may reside. By only searching the web, many users probably don’t realise how much information they miss or is ranked too low to be picked up. We are extremely excited about the forthcoming launch as we believe that combining Scopus with Scirus will provide one of the highest quality content resources and one of the most powerful search tools available in the market.”

About Scopus

  • Scopus is Elsevier's highly anticipated, full text-linking abstract and indexing (A&I) database
  • The first fully functioning version of Scopus was released to select libraries for final testing and user trials on 15th March 2004. Full commercial release of Scopus is expected in Q4 2004
  • Scopus was conceived solely in response to librarian and user requirements, and is the result of a two year collaboration with librarians and researchers at over 20 of the world’s foremost institutions
  • At the heart of Scopus is the biggest A&I database of scientific literature ever assembled, covering titles from over 4000 STM publishers. Scopus also simultaneously searches the scientific Web using the science-only Internet search engine, Scirus
  • The Scopus user interface offers easy-to-use searching straight from the home page and intuitive browsing tools
  • Users can link to their entitled full-text articles in one click, making ‘dead-links’ a frustration of the past
  • Industry-leading levels of reliability and powerful delivery will be coupled with local customer support, customer-specific usage reports which will be COUNTER compliant, as well as on- and off-site training, to make Scopus a complete package for librarians and end-users

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions — among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey— and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/science-and-technology/focus-on-the-scope
www.elsevier.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-30
48934
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VVCKAUSBQSHF4IYFZCD2IXH6G7JKPVBU
<urn:uuid:27d063d2-4d8b-497a-9751-80f6526ff887>
2016-07-27T19:20:14Z
166.78.109.115
sha1:HY5KIR5MFSL3T54OZOXMOR7HW2JW5DYQ
<urn:uuid:d208f8c4-91d5-4522-968d-889392638f42>
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/science-and-technology/focus-on-the-scope
length
response
<urn:uuid:71239636-b07b-443f-afc9-e842e5143029>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-30
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf