“The interconnectedness of all things,” is the mantra of not-quite-detective (debate remains on whether he is quite holistic) Dirk Gently, and rarely does it reach more of a truth than in research fields, where the understanding the state of the art is as much an understanding-the-context as an understanding-the-content.

Here at the Salmon Library, one of our key resources for seeing how articles and research are interconnected is Scopus: an Elsevier product that helps to see which articles are citing which other articles, how they are being cited, how they are being used in other ways (online mentions, social media mentions), how they relate to the author’s body of work, how the journals in which they are published match up with the field as a whole, and so forth.

Whether you are a professor looking to get published or a student wondering which articles you should prioritize with your capstone project, Scopus can help, and it is about to get bigger.

The Scopus blog has just announced today that the team will begin the Scopus Cited References Expansion project. Among other things, this will track citation data back to 1970, giving a better overall picture of how articles and researchers use other articles and research. For any field of research that needs to go back more than the past couple of decades, this will be invaluable.

To quote from their blog:

The Cited References Expansion project aims to increase the depth of Scopus’ scholarly content while enhancing the ability to use Scopus for evaluation and trend analysis. Moreover, author profiles and h-index counts of researchers who published articles prior to 1996 will be more complete.

The increased indexing will “become apparent” in the fourth quarter of 2014, and should be completed in 2016.

Curious about Scopus and how you can use it? Contact the Reference Desk (phone: 256.825.6528 or email: erefq@uah.edu, see link for more options) and we can help!