ScopusScopus- An Overview

Presented by Virginia Chiu

Agenda

1. How did we develop Scopus?

2. Why Scopus?

Agenda

1. How did we develop Scopus?

2. Why Scopus?

How did we develop Scopus

Why Develop Scopus? Navigation is the Next Big Thing:

There is simply too much information available And too little time to search it all On the web, in databases, in libraries

Users and librarians told us they want A simple, single entry-point to the world’s scientific information Easy to use Combining official publications and everything on the web Integrated with other library resources And with the full text only one click away

Elsevier wants to supply researchers with workflow tools that increase their productivity

Starting from the users’ needs

If we understand the

researcher workflow

we can design better

products

So we significantly

invest in user-based

design

？Ｘ！

How do users cope with How do users cope with

this complex environment?this complex environment?

WebsitesWebsitesand digital and digital archivesarchives

Peer Peer reviewedreviewed literatureliterature

ScienceScienceMedicineMedicineTechnologyTechnologySocial sciencesSocial sciences

PatentsPatents

　　 Institutional Institutional repositoriesrepositories

Searching the four domains

How we conduct usability testing

Sit together at user’s site Use combination of functional prototype and static

pages One hour structured interview

Discuss professional background, current research, level of computer expertise, information sources they use

Let user explore the prototype, doing searches, minimal prompting

Go through specific parts of the product and let user do specific tasks, stimulate ‘thinking aloud’

User carries out work and explains

Finding new articles in a familiar subject field Finding author-related information

articles by a specific author information that would help in evaluating a

specific author Staying up-to-date Getting an overview or understanding of a new

subject field

Learned to facilitate the major

tasks

Content Selection Criteria Content Selection Committee (consisting of 20

scientist and 10 subject librarians) installed Suggest new titles/sources Yearly approval of title list Contribute to overall strategy

Important criteria At least abstract in English Regular publication Peer review/quality

Scopus for Researchers

Designed and developed with users to meet their needs:

better navigation through the research literature easy evaluation of scientific information

Researchers want to find the information they need,

not become expert searchers They want a tool that’s as easy to use as web search

but delivers precise results That takes them to the full-text article they’re

subscribed to in just one click

Agenda

1. How did we develop Scopus?

2. Why Scopus

用 Google 搜尋 , 超過五百萬筆資料 ?!

用 Google Scholar 搜尋 , 超過十萬筆資料 ?!

WebsitesWebsitesand digital and digital archivesarchives

Peer Peer reviewedreviewed

literatureliterature

ScienceScienceMedicineMedicineTechnologyTechnologySocial sciencesSocial sciences

PatentsPatents

Institutional Institutional repositoriesrepositories

有效的搜尋工具

Linking back to all Linking back to all

four domains from the four domains from the

Abstract pageAbstract page

Author Identifier +

Citation Tracker

Web & Patent Citations

Scopus records now link to Cited By for… Cited By – Web Sources Cited By – Patents

Sources include:

Web Sources

MIT Open Courseware

Toronto T-Space – UofT repository

DiVA – repository of a number of Scandinavian U’s

Caltech – Institutional Repository

NDLTD – Theses and Dissertations

PatentUSPTO – US Patent Office

EPO – European Patent Office

WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization

Why is it important?

Leads researchers to relevant web and patent information

that might have been missed otherwise

Expands the available content for users

It is an additional quality indicator: Thesis and dissertations Preprint servers Patents – These are high quality sources

It makes a clear distinction between peer-reviewed cited by’s

(Scopus) and non-peer reviewed cited by’s (Web & Patent)

Example I - Lee, C.K.

Example II - Ju, S.P.

Evaluating scientific research output

Why is evaluation so important?Case study – evaluating an author

Why do we evaluate scientific output

Government Funding Agencies Institutions Faculties Libraries Researchers

Funding allocations Grant Allocations Policy Decisions Benchmarking Promotion Collection management

Criteria for effective evaluation

Objective Quantitative Relevant variables Independent variables (avoid bias) Globally comparative

Why do we evaluate authors?

Promotion Funding Grants Policy changes Research tracking

Important to get it right

Broad title coverage Affiliation names Author names Including co-authors References Subject categories ISSN (e and print) Article length (page numbers) Publication year Language Keywords Article type Etcetera …

Data requirements for evaluation

Citation counts Article counts Usage counts

There are limitations that complicate author evaluation

Data limitations

Author disambiguation Normalising Affiliations Subject allocations may vary Matching authors to affiliations Deduplication/grouping Etcetera

Finding/matching all relevant information to evaluate authors is difficult

The Challenge: finding an author

How to distinguish results between those belonging to one author and those belonging to other authors who share the same name?

How to be confident that your search has captured all results for an author when their name is recorded in different ways?

How to be sure that names with unusual characters such as accents have been included – including all variants?

The Solution: Author Disambiguation

We have approached solving these problems by using the

data available in the publication records such as Author Names Affiliation Co-authors Self citations Source title Subject area

… and used this data to group articles that belong

to a specific author

Step 1: Searching for an author

Enter name in Author Search box

Professor Chua-Chin WangNational Sun Yat-sen University組別 : 系統晶片組學術專長 : 積體電路設計、通信界面電路設計、類神經網路實驗室名稱 :VLSI 設計實驗室研究室分機 : 4144

Step 2: Select Professor WangAvailable information

Which author are you looking for?

Step 3: Details of Professor Wang

Unique Author ID & matched documents

No 100% recall…

The same author with different author ID’s

Why were these not matched?

Quality above all: Precision (>99%) was given priority over recall (>95%)

Not enough information to match with enough certainty For instance affiliations missing or different departments, and

all different co-authors or

no co-authors, no shared references

As there are many millions of authors there will be

unmatched papers and authors

Solution: Author Feedback

Feedback loop includes check

by dedicated team to insure accuracy

Dedicated team investigating

feedback requests to guarantee quality

Evaluation Data

Instant citation overview for an author

… we have matched the author to documents – now what?

Step 4: The citation overview

Excluding self citations

Export to excel for further analysis

But not:

Conclusion

Search has had a significant impact on how researchers

work and scientific publishing Scientists have very specific needs and rely heavily on

their ability to find the information they need General web search engines are not the answer

Enable users to get the most out of large content collections

without needing knowledge of syntax Ensure the discovery tool fits with the researcher's workflow

Thank you!