Friday, January 27, 2006

Elsevier Scopus : launch of citation tracker & short review

Another Elsevier news: the launch of a citation tracker in Scopus promises easy use of citation data to researchers. If this use is or will be as usefull as the Web of Science tools will be clear the next years. I think they will not stop at this and develop more. A quick scan tells me you can only evaluate 500 records at once and the data is limited to 1996. Although, a quick selection of 509 records from the hospital returns no error .... We will have to evaluate Scopus more and compare it to WoS. At this moment the scope of Scopus is too little. Everybody likes the search-interface and the way you can limit functions, but there are serious gaps in the content they are offering at this time. I am convinced that -to be a real competitor against Web of Science from the medical perspective- they have to integrate more content and it should not be their own content if they are sensible. The question is who will be the first to succeed in integrating the largest and best medical resources , combining that with a excellent search interface AND a flexible citation evaluation tool. Will it be Scopus or Google? Will ISI take action? Or will Ex-Libris improve it's Metalib federated search options and try to solve the problem they have with not having a grip on the content? http://au.news.yahoo.com/060125/3/xpns.html

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