Find it on WebCites

Scopus, the abstract and citation database, has introduced WebCites – a service enabling users to track the influence of peer-reviewed research on scientific literature.

Currently, Scopus users have the ability to search 15,000 peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences, and in the fields of science, technology and medicine. The database is also integrated with the scientific Elsevier search engine Scirus and with patent literature.

The addition of WebCites will enable users to see citations to articles in Scopus from a number of selected scientific sources on the web, including institutional repositories such as Caltech, and dissertation databases such as the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). “This will lead to additional citations, and will also bring users to information they wouldn’t find just by looking at the citations within Scopus itself,” said Niels Weertman, head of product management at Scopus.

Scopus makes a distinction between citations from peer-reviewed literature, patent citations and web citations, said Weertman. WebCites displays the number of times an article in Scopus has been cited by documents in the selected scientific web sources. The user can click on this number to go to a web results page in Scopus.

“We saw a growing interest for people to see how often peer-reviewed literature is being cited in authoritative sources on the web,” said Weertman. Scopus had been planning to introduce the functionality for some time, he said, but it has taken a while. “In order to have high-quality citations, that takes a fair amount of work. It’s not something you can do overnight.”

The web sources had been selected carefully, added Weertman. “All the sources we’ve included in WebCites are covered by Scirus. We select sources that are most relevant and most authoritative.

“Certain repositories have only just started, so there are only a handful of articles in there. So first we focus on repositories where there is more content already there.”

Eventually, Scopus plans to include in WebCites all the authoritative sources covered by Scirus.

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