Transcript Slide 0

Scopus
- 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
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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
this complex environment?
Searching the four domains
Websites
and digital
archives
Peer
reviewed
literature
Science
Medicine
Technology
Social sciences
Patents
Institutional
repositories
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
Learned to facilitate the major tasks
 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
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?!
有效的搜尋工具
Websites
and digital
archives
Peer
reviewed
literature
Science
Medicine
Technology
Social sciences
Patents
Institutional
repositories
Linking back to all
four domains from the
Abstract page
Author Identifier +
Citation Tracker
Web & Patent Citations
 Scopus records now link to Cited By for…
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Cited By – Web Sources
Cited By – Patents
 Sources include:
Web Sources
Patent
MIT Open Courseware
Toronto T-Space – UofT repository
DiVA – repository of a number of Scandinavian U’s
Caltech – Institutional Repository
NDLTD – Theses and Dissertations
USPTO – 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
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Government
Funding Agencies
Institutions
Faculties
Libraries
Researchers
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Funding allocations
Grant Allocations
Policy Decisions
Benchmarking
Promotion
Collection management
Criteria for effective evaluation
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Objective
Quantitative
Relevant variables
Independent variables (avoid bias)
Globally comparative
Why do we evaluate authors?
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Promotion
Funding
Grants
Policy changes
Research tracking
Important to get it right
Data requirements for evaluation
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 Citation counts
Broad title coverage
Affiliation names
 Article counts
Author names
 Usage counts
Including co-authors
References
Subject categories
ISSN (e and print)
Article length (page numbers)
Publication year
Language
There are limitations that
Keywords
complicate author evaluation
Article type
Etcetera …
Data limitations
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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
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How to distinguish results between those belonging to
one author and those belonging to other authors who
share the same name?
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How to be confident that your search has captured all
results for an author when their name is recorded in
different ways?
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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
Professor Chua-Chin Wang
National 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
Enter name in Author Search box
Step 2: Select Professor Wang
Available 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
… we have matched the author to documents – now what?
Instant citation overview for an author
Evaluation Data
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!