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In honor of National Nurses Week in the US and International Nurses Day on May 12, we bring you a guest post from Karen Holland, Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board Chair for Nursing, Health Professions and Education.

ElsevierConnect has developed a dedicated page to celebrate Nurses where you can find regular content for and by nurses; opportunities such as the upcoming Superheroes of Nursing contest, and special features just for this Nurses Week such as the below video and free access to top-cited research in Elsevier's nursing journals.

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

Increasingly people are aware that Scopus is by far the largest scholarly database for the humanities. Out of 8,000 active journals and book series titles in the social sciences 2,600 are in Arts & Humanities. Next to that our books expansion program is beginning to show impressive numbers with thousands of monographs also being indexed in Scopus.

But perhaps less well known is that the influence of Arts & Humanities is also noticeable in other fields. Let’s have a look at this and take as case in point the works of Benedict de Spinoza, who was born almost four hundred years ago actually not that far from our office here in Amsterdam. He wrote on many philosophical topics such as politics and psychology and has been credited for pre-empting the Enlightenment . He even wrote on the concept of “scopus” (an intended goal)! Einstein once said that if he believed in a god it would be the god of Spinoza.

If you search for Spinoza in Scopus you will get an impressive list of records: 219 in

Twice a year the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) comes together for a few days to discuss and make decisions regarding Scopus' content and content policies. Our next meeting starts next Wednesday and we are looking forward to discussing topics such as: publication ethics, content type expansion and ongoing content development programs, the overall review and acceptance process, and much more. I can vouch that these discussions are both lively and fruitful for all involved. And as Scopus' product marketing manager, I have the opportunity to present -- and get feedback on -- our new UI launching in January (more to come in subsequent blog posts), our new info site home on Elsevier.com, and general marketing strategy. Plus, I get to listen to the dynamic debates. This group is never at a loss for ideas and it is invigorating for the Scopus team to see how dedicated they are to Scopus' success and to the pursuit of science.  

So what is the CSAB exactly?