Scopus Database Access Continues at Boston College
Since January of 2015, members of the Boston College community have had access to the Scopus database. Scopus is a large multidisciplinary database, similar to the Web of Science database. BC researchers and students are using Scopus for author, subject, and citation searching in a wide array of disciplines. Faculty can use it to find H-Index information, compare journal impact data, and analyze publication and citation trends. Scopus provides comprehensive coverage of a large number of journals from 1996 – present, with added older content (comprehensive coverage back to 1970 is expected by late 2016). Due to very positive user feedback, the original Scopus trial has been funded and extended for another year to December 2017.
What are users saying about Scopus? Comments from a campus-wide user survey, a graduate-student study, feedback sessions and website comments have indicated the following: users find the search interface easy to use and visually effective; they like that author searches more reliably retrieve results limited to the chosen author, rather than including results from other authors with the same name (a benefit of the sophisticated “disambiguation” algorithm embedded in the database); and they appreciate being able to see the connections between citing and cited articles (just as in Web of Science, but delivered in a different manner).
Many, however, especially appreciate the data and visual analysis tools delivered by Scopus. These tools make it easy to see emerging research trends for individuals, academic departments and specific search terms. Here you see screen shots showing visualization of data analysis resulting from a search for Boston College publishing on the topic of “climate change”.
Figure 1 shows how publishing on this topic has grown over time.
Under another tab (Figure 2), you can see the names of the BC authors who publish with greatest frequency on climate change topics.
Figure 3 shows the journals where BC authors publish tend to publish on this area of study.
Another tab, not shown here, reveals those BC campus departments publishing most prolifically in this area. An additional tab shows BC author collaborations with researchers at other institutions in this work. Similar results and visualization analysis can be applied at all levels of granularity, making Scopus a particularly effective tool for comparisons at the institutional, departmental, and/or specific topic level.
Those looking for multidisciplinary indexing of the journal literature, particularly in the Humanities, and those requiring journal literature indexing prior to 1996, continue to use the Web of Science. Usage numbers for each database were quite similar this past summer. If you have thoughts to share about either Scopus or the Web of Science or would like to learn more about either database, please contact the Scopus/Web of Science Task Force.
Learning to Use Scopus will be Required in “Tools for Scholarship” Course in the Graduate School of Social Work, Spring 2017:
Adam Williams, Senior Reference Librarian/Bibliographer, Social Work Library, will be working with Social Work graduate students when they take a Spring 2017 Canvas-based course on the skills they need to succeed in their program. Scopus will be one of the key components in the Library Resources module. Dr. Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Director of the Social Work Doctoral program, and her team, reworked the Tools for Scholarship course into online, self-paced learning modules with sections on topics such as Citation, Academic Integrity, Human Subject Protections, and Library Resources.
The inclusion of Scopus in the Tools for Scholarship course came from the recommendation of doctoral students attending the libraries’ Scopus workshops throughout the past year. PhD students found the data visualization and search term analytics particularly valuable functions to help assess and revise their search strategy. The extensive citation tools in Scopus also helped doctoral students identify key authors on topics of interest.
The multidisciplinary nature of social work research makes Scopus an appealing resource. Dr. Pitt-Catsouphes and the doctoral students find Scopus to be a more robust and comprehensive alternative to Google Scholar for exploring the peer-reviewed literature in any field of study.”
