Tree of Science with Scopus: A Shiny Application

Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship

Tree of Science (ToS) is an integrated web-based platform for a comprehensive analysis of scientific literature. ToS is designed to facilitate finding relevant literature and can be used by students, researchers, and academics. Based on graph theory metrics, this tool visualizes the works in a knowledge field as a tree where the roots are classic articles, the trunk represents those articles that allow the area to grow, and the leaves are the recently published articles. This article provides a description of how to search, format, and upload the data and identify significant literature in a specific research area. Finally, a brief description of how the Tree of Science works.

Publications, 2021

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations. Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place. This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB.

2016

Our objective was to visualize scientific published production in order to discover how Slovenian researchers registered in six principal disciplines (Biotechnical sciences (agriculture and related), Engineering sciences & technologies, Humanities, Medical sciences, Natural sciences & mathematics, Social sciences) relate to each other in co-authorship maps and which patterns are identifiable on different levels of subject categorization. 65,000 unified (duplicates excluded) records (1996-2014) were harvested from Scopus and Web of Science, and linked to COBISS (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System & Services) enriched by SICRIS classification data (Slovenian CRIS). COBISS/SciMet (COBISS Scientometrics) extracts large metadata sets for the purposes of metrics. VOSviewer was employed for visualization as a method of Big data analytics. Some disciplines cooperate within more uniform clusters: medicine, and especially humanities and social sciences. Natural sciences show the stronge...

Research Analytics, 2017

A Brief History of Scopus ◾ 33 citation database (covered elsewhere in this book), which was already well established and known for its infamous Impact Factor (IF) rating of scientific journals. However, in its young history, Scopus has done incredibly well so far, growing from a mere 27 million indexed items in 2004 to over 67 million items at the time of writing in 2017, drawn from more than 22,700 serial titles; 98,000 conferences; and 144,000 books from over 5,000 different publishers worldwide, and last year, in 2016, it introduced its own CiteScore metric of journal performance. Today, Scopus is being used as the primary research citation data source by researchers and health professionals from top universities and research institutes around the globe, by leading university ranking organizations such as Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), by funding organizations such as the European Research Council (ERC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and by evaluation bodies conducting national research assessments such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom in 2014 and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercises in 2010, 2012, and 2015. This chapter aims to give an overview of Scopus' remarkable success story since its inception, including its user interface, functionality, advanced analysis tools, and bibliometric indicators; its coverage of different subject areas, publication years, sources, and document types; its stringent content selection policies and processes; the many author and affiliation profiles that can be found in Scopus; how Scopus data feed into other Elsevier research products such as SciVal, ScienceDirect, Pure, and Mendeley; and how customers use Scopus Custom Data (SCD) and Scopus application programming interfaces (APIs) to incorporate into their own tools.

Asian Social Science , 2013

Nowadays, the world’s scientific community has been publishing an enormous number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to answer frequent questions which researchers ask, such as: How Web of Science and Scopus are different? In which aspects these two databases are similar? Or, if the researchers are forced to choose one of them, which one should they prefer? For answering these questions, these two databases will be compared based on their qualitative and quantitative characteristics.

2016

The life sciences domain has been one of the early adopters of Open Data Initiative and a considerable portion of the Linked Open Data cloud is comprised of datasets from Life Sciences Linked Open Data (LSLOD). This deluge of biomedical data and active research over the past decade resulted in the flux of scientific publications in this domain. PubMed resource provides access to MEDLINE, NLM’s database of citations and abstracts in the biomedical domain. PubMed Central provides links to full-text articles along with publisher web sites, and other related resources. In this paper we present PubMed Visual Interface (PrEVIEw)a web based application to access information related to publication, research topic, author and institute through a visual interface. PrEVIEw not only provides useful information e.g. research topic of interest, research collaboration at personal or institute level etc, for the biomedical research community but also helpful for the working Data Scientist. We also ...

2013

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 2011

Objective: This study evaluates the effectiveness of the related search functions in Web of Science and Scopus. Web of Science has one related search function (searching by references) whereas Scopus has three related search functions (searching by references, authors, or keywords). Methods: Thirty queries were searched in both Web of Science and Scopus. For each query, the most relevant document was retrieved and its first thirty related documents were assessed for relevancy to the original query. Results for both databases were compared using the median values of precision. For Scopus the three different methods of relevance were compared using median precision values. Results: The median precision value for the related documents retrieved from Web of Science was 0.63, while the median for those retrieved from Scopus using the related by references function was 0.62. A Wilcoxon test showed no significant difference in the two medians. In the comparison of the three related functio...

Quantitative Science Studies, 2020

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board. Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall. The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings. Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through applicat...

Nucleic Acids Research, 2003

As scientific literature databases like MEDLINE increase in size, so does the time required to search them. Scientists must frequently inspect long lists of references manually, often just reading the titles. XplorMed is a web tool that aids MEDLINE searching by summarizing the subjects contained in the results, thus allowing users to focus on subjects of interest. Here we describe new features added to XplorMed during the last 2 years (http://www.bork. embl-heidelberg.de/xplormed/).