Scopus content update: the Arts & Humanities
Scopus turns 10 this year (!) and we are doing a bit of looking back – and looking forward – to see how the database has grown from both a user and content perspective. One area that we thought would be interesting to focus on is the specific improvements Scopus has made in the coverage of the Arts & Humanities; below is a brief overview of a few content enhancement projects.
2008/2009
In 2008, Scopus covered approximately 2,000 Humanities titles. In 2009, to further increase the number of Humanities titles in the database, project MUSE and the initial ERIH list were used to identify additional relevant titles that could be reviewed via the Scopus Title Evaluation Process (STEP).
2011
A similar content expansion project was undertaken in which the coverage of the revised ERIH list, the Social Science Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the titles list of Evaluation Agency for Research and Evaluation, France (AERES), and the Humanities journal indexes Cairns and Francis were used. These journals were reviewed and added to the Scopus database, together with the Humanities titles selected for Scopus coverage via STEP.
2012
Scopus coverage grows to almost 3,500 Humanities titles and that number increases to 4,200 when also including Humanities-related titles – 20% of the Scopus database. This includes all serial publication types, such as journals, book series and conference series.
2013
Many publications in the Arts & Humanities are not published in journals but in books. The Scopus Books Enhancement Program was set up to address this issue – it aims to index around 75,000 books by the end of 2015. To date (March 2014), we have indexed 30,000 books and these are visible in Scopus!
Want to learn more about the Arts & Humanities in general? Check out the Arts & Humanities March 2013 issue of Research Trends. Research Trends is (ISSN 2213-4441) is a quarterly magazine providing insights into scientific trends based on bibliometric analysis (using Scopus, mainly).