SCOPUS

- A USER'S GUIDE -

Contents
Introduction
Basic search
Categories
Accessing full text
Accessing indexing
Proximity operators
Saving searches
Sources
Author search
Registration and Endnote

Introduction

• Scopus is a relatively new Elsevier European database available since 2004
• It is a general science database, originally of most relevance to engineering and mathematics, but has recently had a great deal of life sciences data added
• Includes over 27 million items from over 16000 peer-reviewed titles published by some 4000 publishers
• Features abstracted records from 1966
• Includes ‘Times cited’ data from 1996
• Has the most advanced and efficient algorithm of any database subscribed to by the University of Auckland
• Scopus does not index the data it adds to its database, but it does include the indexing that has already been done by the databases from which data has been harvested
• Includes data from its parent database Science Direct, as well as EMBASE (another Elsevier product) Medline (but not all data in some cases), Ingenta and several other sources. As such databases generally index their own material, the indexing can be accessed in Scopus
• Is particularly good for also presenting links to academic/scholarly web sites and for patents, the latter of which there are ocer 23 million.
• Is useful when used in conjunction with Medline as it is far easier to manipulate data on Scopus than in Medline
• Includes ‘In press’ articles (these are also included in Science Direct)

Section 1. Basic search

A good example to use to show how widely differing results can come from not using the correct keyword search terms is the‘Evaporation from hot-water lakes’ example.
On the Basic search page, do the following search:   

“Hot-water lakes”  (all phrases must use “ ”) combined with  evaporation

There will be 0 (or close to 0) results.
Then redo the search using the following search terms:

Hot OR thermal OR geothermal OR geo-thermal OR hydrothermal OR epithermal  combined with (AND)
spring* OR lake*          * =  truncation symbol. If you wish to truncate a search term which is also a phrase, use round brackets around the truncated phrase:  (heart attack*) 

Once you have your search results, use the Search within results box (note that this searches all available fields) to refine the search, using the search term:  evaporat*

If you are searching for biological data, always include the genus name and the common name in your search  eg.   snapper OR lutjanus  / chimpanzee OR pan

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Section 2. Categories

One can choose to limit one’s search initially from within Life, Health, Physical and Social sciences.

However, excluding any of these will not necessarily exclude all articles from those fields because the contents of many journals fall in more than one category. To exclude or include certain journals, or subject fields, use the Refine results box that appears above the search results. This box breaks the search results up into source title, author, year, document type and subject area. Any of these parameters can be ‘excluded’ or ‘limited to.’ Click the ‘more’ links to see the complete lists.

Note that the Search within results box can be used any number of times to progressively refine a search down.
Having performed all your searches, going back to the Search page (top left of the tool bar under the Scopus heading) will allow you to view all searches executed in that session, at the base of the page. If required, these search sets can be combined with Boolean operators in the Combine box of the Search History box. Set numbers have to be preceded by #.  For example, #1 AND #2

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Section 3. Accessing full text

Search results in are presented in three boxes, Abstract and refs, View at publisher and the Find Full Text link. The Find Full Text link resolver works quite well. However, the ‘View at Publisher’ link is generally more reliable and faster. Note that the ‘View at publisher’ text is often missing from within this box, but the link still works without it. It will often be able to take you to an online full text version to which Voyager does not have access. Note also that if the journal full text is part of an aggregate package that the library has purchased (rather than direct from the publisher), the ‘View at Publisher’ link may not be able to access it, but the Find Full Text link will. The Abstract and refs link takes you to the full bibliographic details as well as the complete reference list of the original article, each of which in turn has Cited by information as well as View at publisher, Abstract and refs and Find Full Text links. One can resort any of the search result categories by clicking on the category headings. This is especially useful for the Cited by column. Look for the most recent of the highly cited documents rather than the most highly cited of any date.

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Section 4. Accessing indexing

When you are in the Abstract and refs page of any article on Scopus, make sure you have the Extended format on rather than Basic format. The Extended format allows you to see the indexing terms from articles that have been indexed by other databases before being added to Scopus. Notice that in the Cited by since 1996 box, you have the option of saving the article as a citation alert. This will be saved under My Alerts.

You can access the indexing of articles by going to the box Find related documents in Scopus based on keywords/selected keywords. Choosing selected keywords will give a list of indexing terms applied by whichever database/databases indexed the article originally. A point to be beware of is that if you choose ‘All keywords’ as your option to search, or tick all or most of the selected ones, you won’t get common articles which have all of those same keywords as part of their indexing. What you will get is all articles that have ANY or ALL of those same keywords. In a biomedical article, indexing will commonly include MESH headings (Medical Subject Headings from Medline) EMTREE headings (from EMBASE), the Author’s keywords from the abstract and Chemical names (see eg. Burmeister 2003, Effects of fluoxetine and d-fenfluramine on cocaine-seeking behavior in rats. Psychopharmacology 168(1-2), 146-154).

Bear in mind that although Scopus in theory has the same content as Medline, if you search Medline using a standard MESH heading, you will get many more hits than you will using that same heading on Scopus. But for most purposes of general use, using Scopus is preferable because of the ease with which data can be manipulated. Where Medline has a distinct advantage for the medical user is the Medline thesaurus and MESH headings sub-search categories that you can choose for each standard MESH heading. I always point this out at Scopus tutorials if you have medical people present. Where Scopus has the advantage over Medline is in data manipulation, especially the Times cited data which is woefully inadequate on Medline because you have to check the Find citing articles individually for each reference and Medline is only accessing the cited data from Medline whereas Scopus is including cites from other databases as well. 

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Section 5. Proximity operators

Mention should be made of the proximity operators W (within) and PRE (precedes) which can often be very helpful to narrow down searches.
For example, one could do the following search:  
avian PRE/3 influenza

This will search for the word avian preceding the word influenza by not more than 3 words.
You can do several of the same operators in sequence. For example, you could do the following search:

Pain PRE/10 morphine PRE/10 operation

This will find any documents where the word pain precedes the word morphine by 10 words or fewer, and where the word morphine precedes the word operation by 10 words or fewer. Note that you cannot mix different proximity operators in the same search. Also you cannot mix the weight of the operators in the same line. For example, the following search will not work because the numbers are different:

pain PRE/10 morphine PRE/12 operation

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Section 6. Saving searches

Once you have narrowed any Scopus search down to the exact search parameters you require, the search can be saved to the My Alerts section of your profile. Simply click the Save as alert link above the Refine results box on your search results.

You will then be asked to set parameters for the alerting process as below:

Choose Text as the option rather than HTML, as text allows the linking of full text documents to your PC each time new results are sent to you.

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Section 7. Sources

Note the Sources link (2nd from top left) of the basic search page. This is an almost complete list of all titles covered by Scopus (there are some titles included in Science Direct that are not on the list to which Scopus still provides full text access. Also some foreign language titles appear in their foreign names on the Scopus list but the same titles appear only under their English translated names on Science Direct). Selecting a subject specific group will list all titles in that group covered by Scopus. Selecting any given year of any title will allow you to access all the articles within that year for that publication. Another point to note here is that if you have lists of references from given journals, in most cases it is actually faster to locate such articles using Scopus rather than the online journal index. In basic search mode, simply search for the first author combined with the first several words of the title and set the date limit. Then access from the ‘View at publisher’ link.

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Section 8. Author search

When you do any general search in Scopus, all the authors listed in the search results are hyperlinked. Clicking on any one of them will then take you to every other item on the Scopus database authored by anyone with the same name and initials as the author name on which you clicked. To find all the articles from any one particular author, use the Author Search link next to the Basic Search link. Type in the author’s family name and his/her initials separated by full stops. Tick the Show exact matches only box, and un-tick any subject categories that are unwanted, particularly for authors with common surnames. The resultant search will give institute addresses for any author with the same family name and initials, making it easy to locate the one wanted. This also gives a hyperlink to all articles by that author that are included in Scopus.

Once you have accessed these articles, you can output the list to a Citation Tracker which creates a chart of Times cited for each document. Citations made in years prior to the previous two years are cumulated.

You can also output the same list to create an Author Bibliography in HTML format and chosen citation style (includes Harvard, Chicago, MLA, APA and others). Remember to sort the articles by whichever criteria you wish first (author, year etc). This works well but note that if there are articles by the same author/authors for different years, in an author sort bibliography it will list the later year above the earlier one. In such cases, you will have to change the positions manually.

You can also request email alerts of all new citations to a given author. You need to be logged in to do this. Search for the author you require using the Author search box. Click on the ‘Details’ link next to the correct author. At the bottom of the right hand column on the author detail information page is a link Inform me when this author is cited in Scopus.  Click this link and add the relevant parameters.

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Section 9. Registration

Once you register with Scopus, you can save citations to a temporary list, save searches as alerts, and save articles of which you wish to be notified when they are cited. If you are already registered with Science Direct, use the same login for Scopus. Be aware that once students are logged in to Scopus, it will cease to be delivered via the Proxy server and they will thus be charged standard internet traffic fees from their Net Account. If they are accessing numerous articles in short spaces of time, these charges can build up very quickly. They will have to be logged in to save alerts, searches or lists. Also if they wish to log off once they have saved whatever they are working on, logging out will not mean that they will cease to be bombarded with security boxes at each click. These will only cease by closing out of the database completely and then re-entering it. If students wish to log in to Scopus from outside the campus, please email the librarian j.lavas@auckland.ac.nz who will organize this for them.

Endnote compatibility
Scopus is compatible with Endnote and uses the direct export option as follows.

Output > Export > RIS format (Endnote) > Export > Open > choose library

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For comments/corrections, please contact j.lavas@auckland.ac.nz