News Analysis - Finding Scopus to grow big in the A&I market. As Scopus gains credibility in the A&I market, Bobby Pickering talked to Amanda Spiteri, marketing director for the division, about its latest developments.

It's just over a year since Scopus got its first public airings at the SLA and ALA conferences in the US. Since its official launch in late 2004, the abstract and indexing (A&I) database has been slowly building up its user base, claiming over 500 customers signed up in the first six months.

It's difficult to say how much of a success that really is, or whether it is making inroads into the market share of Thomson Scientific's competing A&I offering, ISI Web of Science. But Amanda Spiteri, the marketing director for ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases at Elsevier, insists that those first 500 accounts are all "real" customers - largely academic and government sector.

"They are generally campus-wide licences, and they are globally evenly spread," she said. "We have given introductory offers to get the product established, but there are significant revenues."

"One way to look at this and measure the success is to compare it with ScienceDirect, which is used by more than 3,000 institutes, mainly academic libraries. That's a good proportion of them who have also chosen to adopt Scopus."

Then there are deals coming downstream that will help widen the user base dramatically - such as the impending agreement with JISC, the government buying consortium that swings deals for FHE institutions. "That will be a real endorsement for us," says Spiteri. "It's like a seal of approval saying Scopus is sufficiently robust and good value for money to buy for these universities."

Spiteri admits that the sales cycle for this product is grueling, and it can take a long time to close a deal. But there's no doubt that Elsevier has been listening to feedback, especially the things that have caused potential users to hesitate.

Content is a big concern for many, especially the bias towards STM and away from humanities. "The problem is that most universities want a service that covers a wide range of subjects that satisfy all their users," says one detractor. "Scopus is heavily biased towards science subjects".