ScienceDirect: Your Questions Answered
July 30, 2012
The questions below were posed to our ScienceDirect team by Innovation Explorers (our online, invitation only advice group made up of researchers and librarians). Our thanks to those members who raise the questions!
Q: What is Elsevier's stance on making ScienceDirect content available to discovery tool vendors like EBSCO?
In 2011 we signed agreements with Summon, Primo and Ebsco that allow them to index the full textof all content available on ScienceDirect (journals and books) in their discovery services. This means that customers of these discovery services should be able to search ScienceDirect and link users to the full text. In 2012, we signed an agreement with OCLC, who will index ScienceDirect full text in their Worldcat Local Discovery Service.
Q: [Can you] Provide an iPhone/iPad app for ScienceDirect or make the website accessible from iPhone/iPad? I am on the road a lot and this makes mine and lots of others life easier.
Yep! iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps are free here:
Note that iPad doesn’t require an app to access ScienceDirect.
Q: It would be great if Publishers like Elsevier could give some fellowships for young scientists to encourage them to publish in specific and/or hot areas. May be it could begin assorting among candidates of this community...
Actually, we do have several award programs for young researchers. While not fellowships, many of our journals have young researchers awards (i.e. the Paper of the Year award given to young researchers by the Journal of Structural Biology).
We’re also very pleased to run 15-20 Scopus Young Researcher Awards every year. Some of these regional awards have cash prizes, some don’t (and none are fellowships), but all of these programs have been developed to encourage excellence in young researchers.
The Elsevier Foundation supports of nursing students, young women scientists, and innovative libraries with several large grant programs:
Q: I would like to download some articles which were published 30 years ago. Unfortunately, they are not available anymore on the website. Could you plan to provide the database providing the age-old articles?
ScienceDirect journals, almost without exception, go back to article 1; issue 1, no matter how long ago that was. If you’re not finding it, it could be that your institution did not purchase the backfiles. Backfiles go from the journal’s start to 1996 (more recent work is just in the regular collection) and are available by subject area, or as a whole, and with a range of purchase options.
Q: Sometimes, I find my article wrongly cited (such as my first name for my family name) in your database. Could it be corrected? If I detected mistakes of this kind, how could I contact you?
There were several questions on authors and citations. In ScienceDirect, we show the names in as they’re entered by the corresponding author. If there is a mistake in the article itself, it would have to be corrected by a corrigendum (contact the Editor or Managing Editor). If you see a mistake in your profile in Scopus, use theAuthor Wizardto fix it.
A larger initiative in the community isORCID, an initiative that assigns each researcher with a unique ID. Along with other publishers and institutes, we’re working with the ORCID organization to help implement this. According to ORCID, its service will be launched in the 4th Quarter of 2012. Tips to improve search results arehere.
Q: How does ScienceDirect differ from other products (including benefits and limitations)? When might I consider using ScienceDirect over other databases such as MEDLINE, EMBASE or CINAHL?
The choice is highly dependent on your specific research activity. ScienceDirect is the largest database of full-text scientific articles (but doesn’t search cross publishers). MEDLINE and Embase are abstract and indexing tools (they don’t have full text) which specialize in biomedical coverage; CINAHL (also abstract only) is specialized in health. We, of course like Embase because it’sindexed by experts, using a unique life science thesaurus (Emtree) which can help refine your searches. Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar are also abstract and indexing databases (i.e. don’t host full text) but cover all disciplines.
ScienceDirect is broader than the specialized abstracting and indexing tools like Medline, Embase and CINAHL (and can therefore give you results in multidisciplinary fields/journals), and will give you full text. However, it is of course limited by covering a single publisher. If you’re searching within ScienceDirect, you can save searches, as well as set upalertswhen you’re cited, alerts for new papers in your field, your favorite journals etc.
More about ScienceDirect and the benefits of (free) registrationhere.
Q: Is there science based on impact factor publications?
Impact Factor is a concept owned by Thompson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Knowledge. Journals must apply to be included and the criteria are fairly stringent. Elsevier journal homepages note the Impact Factor of the journal, but it’s not something that comes up in the article record on ScienceDirect.
Scopus (with abstracts from more than 5,000 publishers) includes metrics such as H-index, SNIP and SJR.
H Index—an indexof productivity and citations for an individual, not a journal.
SNIP-measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. This improves the ability to compare “impact” between fields.
SJR-measures the prestige of scholarly sources i.e. a citation from a source with a high prestige has more weight than a citation from a source with a lower prestige
All journal and researcher quality metrics have their advantages and disadvantages. There’s more about them herefrom the University of Toronto.
Q: Will there be any reference management function offered by ScienceDirect?
Yes! In January Elsevier acquiredQuosa, a top reference and download manager with functions like full-text PDF retrieval, ability to organize articles, and integration with other citation management software. You’ll be see lots more in this area soon.
Q: Government agencies (US) put out many books, pamphlets, and other papers. How about at least having the titles and maybe a short abstract for all to see.
We don’t do it often, but we have publishedsets of advice papersfrom groups like the League of European Research Universities. They asked us to (which we did free of charge) in order to further share their work and to see what was best read. That said, it isn’t something we’re actively acquiring at the moment.
We are also talking with various government institutions about indexing these types of publications in Scirus and SciVerse Hub. This means users will find these publications in their search results. To read the full text, they will be linked back to the platform of the government institution.
Q: To facilitate precise retrieval Semantic Web technology and Linked Data are being used in some databases.Also social tags and folksonomies will help to some extent to enhance information retrieval. Does SD think on this line? If so what is the progress?
We have adeveloper networkin the community, helping us to integrate semantic web technology, develop applications and other elements of enhanced information retrieval. Content APIsare open for ScienceDirect and Scopus. If you want to know more about social tags and folksonomies, I’ll have to defer to my colleagues on the developer network (you can contact them via the site).
Q: It would be great to have tutorials aimed at returning graduate students. We have an influx of persons who finished their previous degree more that 10 years ago.
We have aTraining Deskthat provides videos (and live web tutorials) on all our tools. If you make a tutorial on any of our tools, we’re happy to upload them too! We also run hundreds of live workshops and trainings on our tools and on writing scholarly articles. In 2011 more than 15,000 students attended one of the 220 writing seminars held by Elsevier publishing staff around the world. More author support (including webcasts) is on the Author Home.
Q: How will ScienceDirect handle the large number of supplemental datasets and their increasing sizes?
The challenge is not so much in hosting them, as it is in reviewing them. Many journals on ScienceDirect host supplemental data, but it’s difficult to ensure that the data is reviewed as well as the article itself. We’re grateful to all the time reviewers spend on articles and can’t really ask them to go through massive datasets. It’s not a challenge we’ve entirely cracked yet. We also need, as a community, to find better ways of developing and enforcing standardization so databases are actually useful. We’re not there yet.
Q: Students are expressing increasing interest in video for all types of learning. How is Elsevier planning on reaching the video generation?
Videos are supported in ScienceDirect (you can search for them in the image search top left). I found 167,502. Which, compared to the 10 million articles in ScienceDirect, is not a ton, but it’s growing. If you’re interested in video tutorials, we have them for all our tools (3rd party content too) on Training Desk.
Q: Is it possible when saving files that it will be saved in file name as its topic's name? So it can be easier for users when downloading several articles.
This came up in our recent study (with Innovation Explorers) on ScienceDirect. It’s definitely a priority since so many people want it, and we hope to implement it via the newly-acquiredQuosatechnology.
Q: I'd like to be able to screen for articles which have downloadable data files attached to them - this would be analogous to what you are doing with your image search. Data, rather than the article, is starting to become the "primary source" in this era of data management.
Yes, we’d like to do a better job making supplementary data and downloadable databases findable. These should be more visible in the new article format, but you’re right, a button (like the image search) would be great. My colleagues in product development have confirmed that it’s already in the development plan.
Q: My frustration is that for every ScienceDirect journal and for features such as Innovation Explorers, I have a different account, username, password. As a reviewer or author for dozens of journals, it is very difficult to keep track of all of these accounts.
We entirely agree. While you don’t need different passwords for Scopus and ScienceDirect, if you’re a reviewer, you do need different ones for journals in the Elsevier submission/reviewing system (EES). We’ve been working on it, and because of our backoffice systems, it’s been difficult. But it’s a huge annoyance, so we will indeed continue to work on it. To try to help you out, when you’re invited to review, we remind you of your password. But yes, it’s a drag, and I apologize. Especially when it’s reviewers who are inconvenienced. They’re the lifeblood of scholarly communication.
Innovation Explorers is actually a feature run by Communispace (a 3rd party we contract to help us facilitate the community) so that will always be separate.
Q: At one point I got weekly or monthly updates on searches or terms I was interested in but I haven't received those for a long time. Did my information disappear or did you change something or was it something I did?
If you don’t log in for several months, your account will be disabled. Possibly this was the case? We’ve got someone looking into this for you, but in the meantime, hereareinstructions for how to sign up to alerts.
Q: I enjoy searching within ScienceDirect. My challenge is to remind students that in addition to the articles, we also have access to e-books. What are the ways you are working on to encourage/support discovery of e-books?
We agree. We’re working on several programs at the moment to encourage the use of e-books. E-books come up on ScienceDirect searches, and we’re working to expose them better in federated searches as well as other library discovery services. In January 2012, we put a better MARC records service in place, in partnership with OCLC. It allows libraries to make use of the new MARC records ordering system, based on entitlements, enabling any library to add to their catalogue records for all books they have access to, regardless of when they were purchased.
Q: Are you going to add more content to SCOPUS in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities?
Yes, it’s a major focus so the numbers will continue to grow. Just last this year we’ve added almost 300 new titles to Scopus (across all areas). This brings the total number of active titles in Scopus to over 19,500 compared to 12,000 journals covered in Web of Science. Scopus has maintained a broad coverage in all subject areas with 33% of its titles in Health Sciences, 30% in Physical Sciences, 21% in Social Sciences (5,900 journals) and 16% in Life Sciences.
Q: I would like to export search results in excel format
You can “Export Citations” from the search results page – which will give you up to 1000 of the results of your search, in the following formats:
RIS format (for Reference Manager, ProCite, EndNote)
RefWorks Direct Export
Plain text format
BibTeX format
…but no direct export into Excel format at the moment.
Q: Prepare a brochure (pdf) format to give to faculty that highlights the significant aspects of Science Direct and any other features that would be especially appealing to faculty in terms of their research and publishing.
Glad you asked! There are several brochures available (in the “Latest Resources” column) here.
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