Improvements to funding data in Scopus: Now 16.5M articles with funding information and easier to identify funded research
Overview:
1. Scopus product enrichment (including deduplication work and data linking improvements) in the Funding Information section of publication records has resulted in:
- more articles with funding information: 16.5M Scopus articles now contain funding information (this includes 900K new articles!)
- the ability for users to see all identified funders associated with a given work, with a higher level of granularity: 3M Grant ID to Funder relationships have been positively impacted.
2. Enhancement of the ‘Funding Sponsor’ search result facet now makes it easier to identify research funded by a specific funder. Users can search by top level funding bodies and get results which include publications acknowledging its sub-parts of the organization (i.e. institutes, departments, or divisions of that funder).
“Associating the complete and correct funder and grant IDs to a published article helps our research community get maximum insights about the funding of research and identify the most well-suited potential sponsors for their own work”, says Scopus Director, Iana Tsandev. “We are pleased that the enhanced Funding Information section now offers more value to our users. We always welcome new ideas and feedback, so I encourage everyone to contact us if they spot an opportunity for improvement.”
Additional information on the enhancement of the ‘Funding Sponsor’ facet
Why is this an important improvement?
Funding bodies often have complex hierarchies where institutes, departments or divisions of an organization are sufficiently large to make their own funding decisions. However, to understand the overarching impact of a funder, it is crucial to be able to extract all supported research, including publications where research was supported by the sub-parts of an organization.
Example: National Cancer Institute is part of National Institutes of Health (NIH). When looking for publications which acknowledge NIH, it is important to account for publications acknowledging National Cancer Institute.
Researchers often acknowledge the funding organization that provided the support without considering hierarchy relations.
Example
What improvements did Scopus make?
During Scopus content processing, the name of the funder mentioned by an author is matched to a funder record in Elsevier's database (already adopted by CrossRef) to allow for searching and narrowing down the results by funder names. Elsevier's funding team keeps track of funding body hierarchies and ensures that the database is up to date.
Until now, there has not been a way for Scopus users to easily identify publications acknowledging top level funding bodies, such as NIH, other than searching individually for each of its sub-parts and doing an aggregation manually. We have now made this possible by making use of Elsevier's funding taxonomy during the content processing. As the result, users are now able to search by top level funding bodies and get results which include publications acknowledging institutes, departments, or divisions of that funder.
Example
What does this mean for Scopus users?
- Funding of research is an important aspect of the research landscape and we are continuously improving how users can get more meaningful insights using funding data in Scopus.
- Funding bodies use Scopus data to understand the impact of the grants they allocate. This improvement will make it easier for funding organizations to identify the publications resulting from their funding.
- Researchers use Scopus to see which funding bodies allocate funds within their research area(s) of interest. The improvement to the funding sponsor facet will make it easier to identify funders supporting published research in a specific area.