With tens of thousands of journals housed within the Scopus database, tracking and analyzing a journal’s performance throughout the year can prove to be a daunting task for researchers and librarians. On May 17, Scopus aimed to enhance researcher and librarian productivity and to save time by unveiling the Scopus Journal Analyzer.
Scopus, a division of Elsevier, is an abstract and citation database of research literature and web sources. The database supports 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers, 33 million abstracts, and results from 386 million scientific websites. Its end goal is to provide subscribers with the scientific, technical, and medical information they need by making the highest quality publications available for reference.
The release of the Scopus Journal Analyzer will provide a way for librarians and researchers to not only refer to Scopus’s offering of publications but also to make evaluating the quality and popularity of those publications easier, thus making the research process more effective and efficient.
The Journal Analyzer compares the performance of journals using an easy-to-read graphing system. Users can select up to 10 journals from the 15,000 available in the Scopus database, and then a graph is created to compare the selected journals across elements, including the number of articles published at a time per journal (publication frequency), the number of total citations received per year for each journal (citation frequency), and the number of citations for a journal in a year divided by the total number of articles published per year—allowing a user to compare the influence of each journal within the research community.
This tool is designed to benefit the most common users of Scopus: researchers, librarians, and information specialists. Niels Weertman, director of Scopus for Elsevier, says, "Librarians, researchers, and information specialists compare journals and journal performance in their day-to-day work, so we wanted to create a tool that will allow them to do this as accurately and effectively as possible."
Researchers often track publications in order to determine which journals are the most prolific, and in following, which journals to submit their research articles to. Further, institutions often track journals in order to determine how well their research is performing and where their research has been cited. "Research institutions can use the tool to create transparency with regard to research and journal performance. The Scopus tool allows these institutions to see if the research they publish is featured in the most influential journals," explains Weertman.
Librarians also need to remain informed on a journal’s performance in order to better maintain the library’s collection. Says Weertman, "Librarians are becoming more involved in determining the quality of publications within the library’s collection. This new tool will help them do this more efficiently. In order to effectively maintain a library’s collection, they need to study the quality of each publication. Users of the Scopus Journal Analyzer will have a quick and easy way to create an objective view of different journals’ performance dating back to 1996."
The Scopus Journal Analyzer comes as part of the overall Scopus subscription, so subscribers can access the service for no added fee. Considering the vast amount of information in the Scopus database, the Journal Analyzer, says Weertman, "will provide a meaningful service" in efforts to increase efficiency and enhance collection quality.