TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: About Scopus
Date: June 2006
Organization: SCImago Research Group - University of Granada
Letter:
In the March edition of The Charleston Advisor an article was published by Dr. Kaemper from Stuttgart University commenting on Scopus. In his article Dr Kaemper pointed out several detailed issues or problems with Scopus.
Our research group regularly uses several databases in large scale and rigorous bibliometric studies and we have done some comparative studies1.
The University of Granada has also been involved since the inception of Scopus as a Development Partner. We find that Scopus is the leading multi-disciplinary database on the market in terms of journal coverage and information retrieval functionalities. In terms of search results we find Scopus has achieved an optimal balance between precision and recall compared with its competitors and in particular performs extremely well on efficient and robust linking to published articles.
On evaluating a database for coverage it is important to take into account the policy of the database.
Scopus stated policy for historical (post-1996) data is to prioritise coverage of items most relevant to research and that are likely to link to full text articles and that will contribute to citation counts. These are defined as articles which carry references. Items such as editorials, notes, book reviews can be considered of lower relevance and may be excluded from older coverage. However, a lack of these items does not affect the ability of the database to support robust literature research and accurate citation analysis.
In my opinion, analysis of database coverage analysis should be done systematically. Reading the article of Dr. Kaemper it is possible to draw the conclusion that there are some missing issues, especially in physics. But what is the rate of missing issues? And how does the set of Scopus physics journals compare with ISI physics journals? Comparative studies need relative data in order to make valid conclusions. A global, multi-disciplinary vision is also needed, not only on a special interest field.
In our view the performance and usefulness of any database should be viewed in general terms of how well it supports the tasks of the researcher - for example in enabling efficient identification and evaluation of key research papers, the ease of use and the overall comprehensiveness of coverage.
We would like to point out that recently Scopus has also shown some outstanding new improvements on a scale we have not seen in other databases and that will have an impact on how we as users, librarians and decision makers do our jobs. These developments also show the potential of Scopus to overtake its competitors as the leading database for bibliometrics, informetrics or scientometrics. Only in the case of co-authored studies before 2003 Scopus does not yet cover all institutional and author affiliation data. However, I do want to stress that we are aware of this and looking into the possibilities for addressing this. Notwithstanding this fact there is a new application that demonstrates the potential of Scopus. The recent introduction of the Citation Tracker functionality is a key breakthrough in support of creating quick and simple overviews of the citation data belonging to a particular author or group of authors. This is an extremely powerful and unique tool for experts and novices alike to do analysis of trends and research performance
We believe it is important to place the detailed issues mentioned by Dr Kaemper into context. We know that the Scopus team have taken Dr Kaempers observations seriously and are working hard to address outstanding items - many of which have already been addressed since the publication of the article in March.
It is our experience that Scopus either matches or outperforms other databases on the tasks for which it was built. Scopus continues to be one of the premier resources for our users at Granada and the Andalucian Consortium and we look forward to continuing our partnership on future developments.
1. Analisis de la cobertura de la base de datos Scopus, Grupo Scimago, El profesional de la información, v. 15, n.2, Marzo-Abril 2006
Félix de Moya Anegón
SCImago Research Group - University of Granada
