STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that Scopus, its abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, has almost doubled its current arts & humanities (A&H) titles to 3,500. Scopus has added various global journals using the European Science Foundation's European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH). This marks the first time that many of the ERIH titles will be available through a global citation database at no additional cost, according to Elsevier.
Founded in 2001, ERIH provides scholars, libraries and other institutions with lists of high quality A&H journals to raise awareness of the titles as a resource for content and an avenue for publishing original research. Journals are included in the ERIH lists and categorised based on audience, distribution and reach, as well as influence and scope by expert scholarly panels from around the world. Scopus users can now search and access top-level A&H journal titles from all three categories included on the initial ERIH lists.
With the addition of the ERIH's titles, Scopus seeks to provide researchers with better access to national and international A&H journals. Subjects with the most journals include literature and literary theory, general arts and humanities, history and visual/performing arts. More than half of the journals are published from the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, followed by 38 percent from the Americas and 2 percent from Asia-Pacific.
Like the existing titles in Scopus, the new journals contain cited references that make previously unavailable bibliometrics data accessible. This information is expected to help A&H scholars more efficiently assess and measure research sources and output, as well as illustrate the broader influence of journal articles published. In addition, Scopus allows tracking of citations belonging to scholarly books via the MORE tab.
Other journals now included in Scopus include Mind (Oxford University Press), Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Cambridge University Press) and Modern Philology (University of Chicago Press). To acquire back content of many journals, Scopus has partnered with Project MUSE, a not-for-profit platform founded by John Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library (MSEL) at John Hopkins University.
