Books, books and more books: Scopus’ Titles Expansion Program

In conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair, we’ve formally announced the Scopus Book Titles Expansion program. Our content operations team has been actively processing books since the Spring and as of our August release books content – at the book and chapter level – has been visible in Scopus’ interface. To date, we have 7,654 books visible (20,000 by the end of the year) and expect to fully index 75,000 books by the end of the project.

So why has Scopus decided to add books? We know that various content types – journals, conference proceedings and books – contribute, through citation activity, to the evaluation of scholarly research and the evaluation of researchers. And in specific scientific fields, each content type may hold different weight. For example, a computer scientist (as our subject chair for Computer Science from the Scopus Content Selection Board (CSAB) has told us time and time again) will more frequently publish in conference proceedings whereas a social scientist may publish more in books. By adding books to Scopus, we are able to better connect the citation patterns of journals, conference proceedings and now books content.

Indexing books allows us to:

1. Improve coverage: Research within the Arts & Humanities is partly done in books and not necessarily in journals. Adding books makes certain subject fields more complete and also further enhances the Author Profiles and h-index of researchers working in these subject areas.
2. Enhance discoverability: Simply having books content in Scopus makes this content source more discoverable to researchers.
3. Measure impact: Indexing books allows us to further measure the impact that books have on scholarly research. And since books often cite journals, adding books can make citation counts of journals more accurate.
4. Increase accuracy: For research assessment, the addition of books gives researchers within the A&H the opportunity to better showcase their full scientific output in theirAuthor Profiles. This is currently easier for other sciences such as life sciences and physics due to the publishing patterns of researchers.

How is book selection made? Book selection is done via a publisher-based approach (sorry, no title suggestions accepted at this time). All books from selected publishers deemed “in scope” will be selected for coverage. The priority of publishers and selection of a book list from a specific publisher depends on:

• Reputation and impact of the publisher
• Size and subject area of the books list
• Availability and format of the book content
• Publication policy and editorial mission
• Quality of published book content

And in other good news: All titles in the Scopus Book Titles Expansion Program are included – at no additional fee – under the standard Scopus license.