Metrics

2014 was a banner year for Scopus featuring great releases, further content expansion for all content types and continuous product improvements based on your feedback. Let’s take a closer look at last year's high points:

• First, 2014 marked the 10^th anniversary of Scopus. Since its launch in 2004, Scopus has grown to become the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, containing 55 million records and more than 21,000 journals from all major fields.

logo.png

Watch a visual overview of the last 10 years

Download the Research Trends Special Issue on the 10 years of Scopus

• In combination with our 10 year anniversary, we initiated a site improvement program resulting in the launch of a more streamlined interface. This was followed by a redesign of the Author Profile Page as well as the introduction of a Simplified Chinese user interface and help files (to learn more about this release, check out the full release notes).
• The independent

In March, we launched the Cited Reference Expansion Program to include cited references in the Scopus database going back to 1970 for pre-1996 content. Our goal is to expand the ability for users to perform long-term, extensive bibliometric and historic trend analyses – and enhance h-indices for those researchers who published pre-1996.

As of November 1st we started re-indexing content and pre-1996 archives with cited references are now loaded on a daily basis. There are currently 500,000+ pre-1996 items with cited references in Scopus. This is having a positive impact on the h-index of senior researchers, making author profiles and h-index counts for these researchers more accurate and complete.

To illustrate this content improvement, we have been tracking the number of total citations and measuring the difference of the h-index for a sample set of authors from various subject areas between June and December.

Since its launch in the fall of 2004, Scopus has established itself as the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Elsevier’s bibliographical database, Research Trends recently published a Special Issue that looks back on these 10 years and illustrates how Scopus can be used in bibliometric studies of trends in the global science system.

For one of the issue’s contributions, Dr. Gali Halevi and Dr. Henk F. Moed conducted a comprehensive search on all Scopus data (limiting the results to full research articles only), coming up with a list of the most frequently cited articles published between 2001 and 2011 in eight main research areas. According to their findings, these were the top cited articles per research area:

Agricultural and Biological Sciences

MEGA4: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software version 4.0 (2007)

Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 24, No. 8, pp. 1596-1599.

Arts & Humanities

The

On Tuesday, November 4, at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Doha, Qatar, U.S. News & World Report, a leading U.S.-based publisher of education analysis and rankings, unveiled the inaugural Best Arab Region Universities rankings.

We’re pleased to announce that U.S. News' Best Arab Region Universities rankings, which focus on institutions’ academic research, are based on research data from Scopus and metrics powered by SciVal!

The ranking methodology weighs factors that measure research productivity and performance, using a variety of bibliometric indicators such as publications and citations. Each ranked Arab region university has a profile page on usnews.com displaying contact information and detailed ranking indicators. The overall rankings include 91 universities in 16 countries; there are also separate rankings in 16 subject areas, including key fields such as computer science, engineering, medicine, mathematics and social sciences.

Using the ‘Affiliation