Scopus is useless
Scopus bills itself as "the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources covering nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers."
Sounds useful. But it's useless. Literally.
Because it's a subscription-only resource:
Now I am an associate researcher at the University of Bristol. UoB is part of the UK Access Management Federation, so I select that in the Shibboleth authentication page:
Another illustration of how the Academic Journal Racketeers (in this case one of the usual suspects, Elsevier) have a stranglehold on research. As well as levying huge subscription charges they also supply a service called SCOPUS which the panels in the Research Excellence Framework will use to inform their deliberations. Needless to say, SCOPUS itself is a subscription-only resource. The academic publishing industry is of course very keen on the Research Excellence Framework. It's certainly an Excellent Framework when it comes to making money. Pity about the actual Research though.
May 30, 2012 at 10:21 am
It would be interesting to compare the results from scopus with a free resource such as google scholar. Although presumably scopus also sells “support”, which administrators find is worth the money so that they have a helpdesk to ask questions like “how do I search?”
There is probably a market for someone to sell support for google scholar…
May 30, 2012 at 10:53 am
Scopus doesn’t cover the arXiv so it misses a huge number of recent citations. I checked mine against both Google scholar and Web of Science and it’s miles away from both.