As of this week, Scopus has added 5 million pre-1996 records including over 93 million references to the database. This has been done in two ways: by adding pre-1996 cited references to existing articles in Scopus and by adding article back files, including their cited references, coming from archives from various publishers, going back to 1970.

This milestone is the result of the ongoing Scopus Cited Reference Expansion Program initiated in March 2014 that aims to include cited references in Scopus going back to 1970 for pre-1996 content. The goal of this expansion program is to further enhance the ability for Scopus users to perform long-term, extensive bibliometric and historic trend analyses – and to enhance and further complete the h-index for researchers who published pre-1996.

Archives already completed include the following publishers: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). American Physical Society (APS), Karger Publishers, Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Springer, American Medical Association (AMA), Inderscience and Elsevier.

Additional archives currently in process include: Wiley Blackwell, BioMedCentral (BMC), Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press, Society of Automotive Engineers International, (SAE), Walter de Gruyter, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Institute of Physics (IoP), Brill Publishers, Sage, Emerald Group Publishing, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

We will keep you updated on the progress of this Expansion Program, and make sure to follow this blog or our Twitter account to stay up to date.”