Elsevier Developing Scopus STM Abstracting and Indexing Database

Elsevier Science is preparing a new, massive, full-text abstract and indexing database covering 14,000 STM resources. Called Scopus, it gleans information predominantly from journals, but there are roughly 1000 conference proceedings as well. The company is looking to add book series, trade publications, and other resources in subsequent releases. Harriett Bell, senior marketing manager for Scopus, told LJ, "The aim is that you can start your search in Scopus and then very easily search across all the scientific peer-reviewed literature and the web at the same time."

Scopus has been in development for two years, with the assistance of 21 universities worldwide, including Oxford, Toronto, and Pittsburgh; Granada University, Spain; Strasbourg University, France; Lausanne University, Switzerland; Chiba University, Japan; Putra University, Malaysia; National University of Singapore; University Kebangsaan, Malaysia; and CSIRO, Australia. Elsevier talked with these librarians to discern what issues they wanted to solve.

According to Bell, Elsevier also hoped to discover "how they drove patrons to use the full-text articles they've invested in, how they service huge numbers of remote users, how they cope with Googlization, all of these issues." The company wanted to determine if there was a need for the product and room for another navigation service in the market. With the only remotely similar product being Thomson ISI's Web of Science, the answer was yes.

Once the concept was finalized, the company began assembling prototypes. "We brought in scientists from different institutions and different disciplines to test it. It's been very much designed by them," Bell stated. A beta version was released in March to the 21 universities and trial customers. Elsevier has received feedback from these early sites on fine-tuning the database before its final version is released in November. Unlike the ISI product, Elsevier "wanted to have one interface to everything," said Bell.

Bell said the feedback from users has been productive in molding the product's parameters. "In terms of what we still need to do, the main thing is to increase content coverage and look at whether we want to include more years of reference data (Scopus currently extends back to 1996)." She adds that Elsevier wants the product to be "driven by the users."

The cost for each buyer will be based on the size of the population served and will differentiate between staff and students. "One thing we are committed to doing is letting the user experience sell the product for us, so we'll look at extended trials, flexible payment options, and installment plans," said Bell.

For future releases, the company will watch workflow integration. Elsevier is investigating more author/citation analysis tools and expanding to include humanities.