My Comment about adding arts and humanities to Scopus

I sent this to the Science Librarians Listserv (sts-l@ala.org)

Scopus has recently announced that it has almost doubled its coverage in the arts and humanities by adding 1450 titles to make a total of about 3500 journals going back to 2002. For several years now, I have used Scopus to do searches in a wide range of areas within the scientific, medical and engineering disciplines. I am quite satisfied with the search interface, journal coverage, and special features of the database. It has been popular with library users at NJIT since we first introduced it.

I question the advisability of integrating the arts and humanities into the same database with the sciences. Scopus gives the user the option of limiting a search to life sciences, physical sciences, health sciences, and social sciences. There is no option to limit to arts and the humanities. According to their announcement the coverage in the arts and humanities only goes back to 2002. A user searching a topic in the arts and humanities may not realize that and miss significant relevant information by limiting the search to Scopus.

My suggestion to Elsevier is to set up a separate database for the Arts and Humanities as is done with the Web of Science.