Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Scopus Now Available at Purdue: What it Means to You

September 26th, 2013

What is it? 

“Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature with smart tools that track, analyze and visualize research.” 

• Over 20,500 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide
  
• Contains 49 million records, 78% with abstracts
• Includes over 5.3 million conference papers
• Provides 100% Medline coverage
• Interoperability with ScienceDirect, Engineering Village and Reaxys 

[http://www.info.sciverse.com/scopus]

Benefits

·        Search a wide variety of sources across most disciplines

o   Analyze results to see the most frequent authors, journals, and disciplines related to your search.

o   Search by author to view an “Author Evaluator” page that visualizes an h-index, breakdown of publications by source, co-authors, subject areas, and generate a graph of citations per year from 1996.

o   Set up email alerts or RSS feeds for: searches, document citations, author citations, or affiliations.

o   Export to print, email, citations managers (EndNote, ProCite, Zotero, Mendeley, Excel, and others), or generate a basic bibliography right from Scopus.

o   Can search by first author only

·        Measure your (and others) scholarly impact [only for publications from 1996 to present]

o   Find out who is citing your publications

o   Find your most cited publication

o   Find the most cited publications in your field/discipline

o   Links to other documents that cite your publications, like patents, dissertations, and other documents in academic document repositories

·        Analyze the impact of particular journals using two journal metrics – SJR (SCImago Journal Rank; similar to Impact Factors) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) that are updated every two months.  Compare multiple journals using the Journal Analyzer, a visualization tool.

Significance/Uniqueness

·        Scopus indexes over 8,000 unique titles compared to Web of Science.

·        More disciplines are represented when compared to Web of Science

Key highlights

·        Alternative, but complementary, to Web of Science

·        Provides analytics and visualization tools to compare authors, publications, and journals.

·        Can set up email alerts related to research of interest, when people cite you, and when a particular person has published something new.

Most disciplines are represented, so all researchers should give it a try. (weakest is Arts and Humanities, but they have taken steps to help correct this over the last couple of years).