Amsterdam, 18 June, 2010 – Scopus® announced today that Kyoto University is employing the former's data and functions in a study performed by Dr. Takanori Ida, Professor at the Graduate School of Economics - Kyoto University. The study shows how effectively the government's large funding scheme, 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program, encouraged research activities in universities across Japan. Through the use of Scopus as tool to identify all research papers related to this program, he examines whether a fair evaluation of the research output has been done.
This study, co-developed by the Graduate School of Economics - Kyoto University and Elsevier Japan, are gathering a list of research papers authored by 6,000 researchers who participated in the COE program. These papers served as object of study in Dr. Ida's quantitative analysis on the transition of the number of citations published by each researcher supported by the COE fund. By means of this investigation, Dr. Ida aims at capturing statistical evidence of policy effect on large funding. He is giving an interim report on June 25th at Kyoto University, along with the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS).
"As a participant of the program and from an academic point of view, I decided to examine policy effect. I chose Scopus because it has a unique author ID for each researcher and it enables the user to create a list of papers by combining full names or affiliation search. In order to reduce potential troubles with outdated data or lack of data caused by name variation, we have asked each researcher for feedback on their papers. Based on this data, we examine the difference between the number of papers and citations according to subject area; we plan to complete our survey within 2010," said Dr. Ida.
"We are honoured to support Dr. Ida in his research done with the help of Scopus. We will continue to improve Scopus with researchers' feedback, making Scopus a more comprehensive and reliable abstract and citation database," remarked Niels Weertman, Performance & Planning Tools director for Elsevier.
About 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program
Large funding program initiated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and from 2002 to 2004, coordinated by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Each COE is funded for five years; the total amount of funds is approximately 176 billion yen (approx. 1.6 billion Euros) for 274 COEs selected out of 1,395 applications in 11 subject areas. The program was succeeded by the Global COE program,
About Scopus
Covering the world's research literature, Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Its unique database contains abstracts and references from 18,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 5,000 publishers worldwide, ensuring broad interdisciplinary coverage. In addition, Scopus not only offers users citation information about the articles covered, but also integrates web and patent searches directly from its clean and simple interface. Direct links to full-text articles, library resources and other applications like reference management software, make Scopus quicker, easier and more comprehensive to use than any other literature research tool. For more information about Scopus please visit http://www.info.scopus.com.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including the Lancet (www.thelancet.com) and Cell (www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus (www.scopus.com), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult (www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult (www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading publisher and information provider. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).