A brief history of Scopus: The world’s largest abstract and citation database of scientific literature

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. It discusses Scopus' coverage of different subject areas, publication years, document types, sources from over 5,000 publishers worldwide, patents and funding data; its stringent content selection policies and processes by an independent board of scientists that ensure that only the highest quality content gets indexed; and the many author and affiliation profiles that can be found in Scopus, created from the combination of state-of-the-art profiling algorithms and manual curation. It shows 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. Being the largest curated abstract and citation database of research literature in the world today, and often selected by customers for the breadth and depth of its content, Scopus indexes three main types of scientific content: research journals, conference proceedings, and scholarly books. The chapter ends with an overview of the many real-world applications of Scopus data, such as its use for national research assessments, university rankings, analytical reports, research landscape studies and enhancing institutional repositories, thus simplifying the life of researchers, students, health professionals, research managers, and funding agencies alike.