There was something in the air in November 2004. Two of what are now among the world’s most popular literature search tools were launched: Scopus on the 10th of November and Google Scholar on the 20th. The launch of these products was an inflection point in how researchers accessed information: there is a good chance that most of you reading this have only ever known a scholarship enabled by the world’s “information at your fingertips”.
A week before Scopus was released, a press release from Library Technology Guides featured a quote from Elsevier’s Managing Director for ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases:
To scholars in 2025, this sentence may a little out of place, given how little time we have today for embracing the unexpected and serendipitous discovery. For us, “relevance” is an attribute reserved for a narrow slice of literature that explicitly relates to one’s specialized research interest. Of course, we access our literature using these same tools that were once about promoting serendipity and accidental discovery. Funny how quickly things can change in 24 years, isn’t it?
In today’s Digest, we have:
