Scopus March 2012 release overview: New Document Details Pages, Interoperability with Hub, Lipid Structures (beta), etc.

The below slides outline the updates to Scopus released 12 March 2012. While most of these changes have already been announced on the SciVerse blog, this goes into a bit more detail on why the updates were made. It also mentions some of the smaller updates not yet announced and introduces some of what I feel to be the most interesting new SciVerse Applications for Scopus.

For two of the more interesting projects, I would like to go into more detail on the process and rationale behind the changes. One of the most noticeable changes is that the interface of the  main panel of the Document Details (Abstract) page has been completely overhauled.  The primary goal for this revamp was to improve the scanability and readability of the page.

We started with the user research already done for the Article of the Future and the new article page on ScienceDirect. From that foundation, our User-Centered Design group developed a prototype and conducted usability studies with researchers and librarians to determine which design elements transferred to  Scopus. As part of this research, we gathered information on which parts of the page users scan for first. The implemented design then focused on optimizing the visual hierarchy, so that the most used information is more prominent. Fonts were also optimized throughout to make reading of abstracts and other elements easier.

The other most noticeable change is the replacement of the tabs from the Document search results pages. When enabled, these tabs would run a users search on Web and Patent content from Scirus. The new links instead display the results in SciVerse Hub. While all existing functionality remains, Hub offers a lot of advantages to the tab structure. Most importantly, Hub offers improved relevancy rankings and additional refine options.  Hub also collapses multiple copies of the same document into a single record.

As part of this update, we now only display the links if results are available and display the results count in the link. Some readers may remember that this count used to be in the tabs, but was removed. Usage has since proven that display of this count is extremely important for users. The More tab has been replaced by a link to “Secondary documents” that works exactly the same as the tab. Our User-Centered Design group also developed a prototype and conducted usability studies to optimize these changes.

Hopefully the the above slides and description, help to give a full picture as to how the recent updates help improve the Scopus user experience. 

We would also like to take this chance to thank all those who helped contribute to the success of these projects. Please feel free to send our Scopus Product Manager, Michael Habib, any feedback you have on these new updates (though for support issues, please follow normal channels).