Category of service: Indexing, abstracting and citation databases
Owner: Elsevier
Creation date: 2004
URL: Scopus.com
Disciplines covered: multidisciplinary
Types of resources covered: peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, book series, conference papers, books and “articles-in-press”
Geographic coverage: international
Coverage dates: from 1823 to present
Number of publications covered: More than 21,500 active titles, of which more than 4,200 are full open access
Number of records in the database: More than 60 million records, of which over 360 trade publications, and journals from more than 5,000 international publishers
Owner: Elsevier
Creation date: 2004
URL: Scopus.com
Disciplines covered: multidisciplinary
Types of resources covered: peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, book series, conference papers, books and “articles-in-press”
Geographic coverage: international
Coverage dates: from 1823 to present
Number of publications covered: More than 21,500 active titles, of which more than 4,200 are full open access
Number of records in the database: More than 60 million records, of which over 360 trade publications, and journals from more than 5,000 international publishers
Aims
Evaluating scientific quality is a difficult problem which has no standard solution. Ideally, find a scope index journal, published scientific results should be scrutinized by true experts in the field and given scores for quality and quantity according to established rules. In practice, however, what is called peer review is usually performed by committees with general competence rather than with the specialist's insight that is needed to assess primary research data.Various methods have been used to evaluate academic journals and consider for indexing. One gets a picture of how competitive the journal is by looking at the acceptance rate vs the rejection rate. Another way is to examine how often articles are cited in subsequent research to gauge a journal's impact.
Indexation of a journal is considered as reflection of its quality. Indexed journals are considered to be of higher scientific quality as compared to non-indexed journals. Indexing medical and Lifesciences Journals have become a debatable issue. For a long-time Index Medicus has been the most comprehensive index of Medical Science journal articles. Over the years, many other popular indexing services have developed. These include MEDLINE, PubMed, EMBASE, SCOPUS, EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale and Chemical Abstracts Service, Publishing Electronic Databases among others.
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, featuring smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Scopus delivers the most comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences and Arts & Humanities.
Evaluating ease of use and coverage of Scopus and the Web of Science (WOS), a 2006 study concluded that "Scopus is easy to navigate, even for the novice user. ... The ability to search both forward and backward from a particular citation would be very helpful to the researcher. The multidisciplinary aspect allows the researcher to easily search outside of his discipline" and "One advantage of WOS over Scopus is the depth of coverage, with the full WOS database going back to 1945 and Scopus going back to 1966. However, Scopus and WOS complement each other as neither resource is all inclusive."
Scopus also offers author profiles which cover affiliations, number of publications and their bibliographic data, references, and details on the number of citations each published document has received. It has alerting features that allows registered users to track changes to a profile and a facility to calculate authors' h-index.