CiteScore was a project I took on shortly after joining Scopus. This was a high profile project to introduce a new journal metric to compete with the rival impact factor. I initially took on the work with a UX colleague, but eventually took on all the responsibility for the project. My work included strategy, design, and user testing.

Building a prototype
Research
Strategy
Launch version

Building a prototype

My UX colleague and I started out with some basic designs for the metric turned over from a UX contractor that worked directly with the data scientist developing the metric. We were tasked with taking that information and incorporating it on to the existing journal detail pages on Scopus. We built out an extensive Axure prototype.

Research

There was a lot of user testing for this project. As this was a new metric much of the testing was related to the concept and content of the metric and how we could show it on Scopus to be useful for librarians, researchers, and publishers who each had different use cases. During the course of the project we conducted 50+ one and one testing sessions both in person and remotely.

We uncovered a number of issues including the very accuracy of the data that it was originally planned to display.

It was also through the testing the UX team named this metric. Initially called “Reference Point” we surveyed customers and it was the survey where someone recommended CiteScore instead.

Strategy

As the project went on, and after speaking with a lot of users, I became more involved with this project at the strategy level which included an emergency trip to Amsterdam to meet with the director for the data science team and the product manager.

The main problem that arose was figuring out a way we could display multiple versions of CiteScore on the same page without it being confusing. As a metric, CiteScore is only released once per year, but there was also a need for a version that would be more current.

Launch version

To add a complication to this project, while this project was ongoing, Scopus was undergoing a rebranding. The journal details pages were actually the first pages to be rebranded, but many of the styles and patterns had not been decided so there was quite a bit of winging it.