Paula pointed out to me that The Charleston Advisor ran a review of Scopus in its January 2006 issue, which is an update to the original review that ran a year earlier. The authors, Louise F. Deis and David Goodman, call Scopus “the Database we hope to love when it grows up.” Their main criticism is missing data even from journals published after 1996 (Scopus acknowledges gaps in the pre-1996 materials). One of their tests revealed that, of the 11 journals tested, 3 were corrected, 3 partially correct, and 5 uncorrected. Two other tests revealed startling gaps, particularly in European journals. They’re estimating that “about 10% of the titles are incomplete for the recent years.”

To be honest, this wasn’t what disturbed me most about the article. It was the reaction of librarians to the situation. They pushed Elsevier to change the default date parameters from “1996 to present” (which is the more complete portion of the database) to “all years” (which means lots more incomplete answers to searches). Why are not information professionals more concerned about the quality of the answers? Why are they not warning Scopus users that this is but one source to check, since it doesn’t have everything the students are likely to believe it has? Or, as Deis and Goodman conclude, is it really true that “our librarian colleagues are not concerned about supplying incomplete data or even about deliberately guiding students to incomplete data”? I find that truly shocking.

Scopus is exhibiting at Computers in Libraries week after next, if you want to go ask them about this.

CIL2006