how to search research paper on scopus

Scopus LibGuide: Searching Scopus

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• Searching Scopus
• Author profile
• Affiliation profile
• Help & Support

In Scopus you can search by Documents, Authors or Affiliations.  For details of the Author and Affiliation search please see the Author and Affiliation tabs.

Document search

Documents include journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, articles in press and data papers. Follow the steps below to learn how to perform a basic document search:

• By default, Scopus will search in the Article title, Abstract and Keywords of documents
• You can specify in which fields to search using the drop-down menu [2]
• Use the +Add search field [3]  option to add additional fields 
• Each new search field is combined using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT [4]
• Select Add date range [5] to either select a publication date range or to specify an "added to Scopus" date range
• To see a complete list of advanced field codes, select Advanced document search [6]
• Your Search History is displayed with the option to Set Alert [7] to notify you by email of new search results in Scopus that match that search
• Select More [8] to save an important query or to delete a query
• To combine queries from your history, choose two or more searches and select Combine queries [9]

Document results page

Editing your search, saving your search and setting alerts

• Saving your search and setting up alerts  [1]
• Quickly review or edit your search from the top of the page [2]
• By default, the search results are sorted by date. Use the ‘Sort by’ drop-down menu to sort in a different order. [3]

Refine your results [4]   From the left-hand menu, you can:

• Search within your results
• Author name
• Open Access type (learn more about the Open Access filter below)
• Subject area
• Publication stage
• Affiliation
• Funding sponsor

Registered users can sign in to:

• Save searches
• Set up alerts to be notified when new documents are added to Scopus that match this search
• Learn how to become a registered user

Export results

Export selected search results [5]   to various file types, reference managers and platforms : 

• RIS format (for import into EndNote

Analyze search results

Analyze Search Results button [6]

Use this feature to gain further insights into any list of document results.

Search Tips

Search Tips in Scopus

• loose phrase, use double quotation marks
• “heart attack” will search for documents where heart and attack appear together
• asterisk is a wildcard
• “criminal* insan*” finds criminally insane and criminal insanity. 
• exact phrase, enclose the phrase in braces  { }

Note: {heart-attack} and {heart attack} return different results, as the first will search for results that contain a hyphen between heart and attack

• Discover more search tips in the Support Center A full guide to boolean and proximity operators, loose and exact phrases, special characters, and other search tips. 

Secondary documents

Scopus also features non-Scopus references, called ‘secondary documents’, which are not indexed in our database for three possible reasons:

• They are retrieved from the references or citations of the documents that are covered by Scopus
• Scopus is unable to match documents with certainty due to incomplete or incorrect data
• There is missing content

To view these non-Scopus references, click ‘S econdary documents ’ above your search results.

• Learn more about secondary documents

Cited reference search

Scopus provides the ability to search the list of cited references in articles, books, etc. If the reference which you are starting with is very relevant to your research, other related publications have probably cited references that are also relevant to your research. Cited reference searching is a useful extension to your standard keyword search.

• Learn how to perform a cited reference search

Open Access filters

Refine your results  [4]

On the document details page, you can filter by Open Access types,   including:

• All open access
• Gold: Documents that are in journals that only publish open access
• Hybrid Gold:  Documents that are in journals that provide authors the choice of publishing open access
• Bronze:  Published version of record or manuscript accepted for publication; the publisher has chosen to provide temporary or permanent free access
• Green:  Published version or manuscript accepted for publication, available at the repository
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How do I work with document search results?

A document search returns a list of documents that provides options for refining, analyzing, and saving results.

Select an area of the document search results page to see the relevant section or browse each topic.

▲ Back to top

Save search

You can save a search to run again in a future session.

After running a search, select 'Save' to save the search parameters.

• You must be signed in to save a search.
• You can save up to 200 searches.

Set search alert

You can create an email alert to be notified when Scopus publishes new documents that fall within your search parameters. For more information about how alerts are used, see How are Alerts used in Scopus?

• You must be signed into Scopus to create a saved search or to create an alert.
• There is no limit on the number of alerts you can create.
• Non-Scopus documents (abstracts available on platforms external to Scopus) and citations derived from Scopus references are not included in Search alerts.
• Provide a name for the alert, email address(es), and the frequency of the alert.
• Select 'Set search alert' .

Search within your results

• Select 'Add search field' .
• From the Search within drop-down, select 'All' .
• Enter your terms in the Search documents field. Note: select the 'Advanced query' toggle to work with complex queries.
• Select 'Search' .

The filters allow you to refine your document results list and limit the results to specific categories of documents.

Limit to or Exclude results

• Tick the checkboxes for your desired filters.

Note: to remove an individual filter, un-tick the filter and select 'Apply change' .

Export filter counts

Select 'Export filter counts' to export the search value numbers to a CSV file.

The Document search results tab shows the found documents and provides tools and functions for viewing, sorting, exporting, and analysis.

Analyze search results function

Scopus provides an analysis of your search results. Select 'Analyze results' to open the Analyze search results page.

The analysis shows you the documents in your search results by:

• Per year by source
• Affiliation
• Country/territory
• Document type
• Subject area
• Source type
• Funding sponsor

For detailed information about the Analyze search results function, see How do I use the Analyze search results function?

Selecting results

• To select single or multiple search results items, select the corresponding checkbox next to a results list item.
• To select All search results items on a page, tick the 'All' checkbox. All search results items for a page are selected.

You can export selected items to a file or to a reference management tool such as Mendeley or RefWorks:

• Scopus results lists including all search results, My lists, and Saved Lists
• Document references

To export your documents, select the documents from your search results and select ‘Export’ and follow the prompts. For more information about exporting documents, see How do I export documents from Scopus?

You can download documents using the Scopus Document Download Manager powered by QUOSA. If a PDF version of a document is not available, you can download an abstract instead in HTM format.

• Select individual check boxes.
• Tick the 'All' box to select all documents shown in the list.
• Select the All drop down, then select 'Select this page' to select all the documents on the current page.
• Tick a selected check box to remove that document from the selection.
• Select 'Download' . The Document Download Manager opens.
• Select 'Download' and PDF documents will be saved to your default browser download folder.

Citation overview

Track how often articles (such as from an author or journal) have been cited using the Citation Overview.

• Select the documents you want to include. Note: You can include up to 5,000 documents in a Citation Tracker. If you select more than 5,000 documents only the first 5,000 are included.
• Select 'Citation overview' .
• Select 'Back to document results' to exit the Citation overview.

For more information about citation overviews How do I create a Citation overview? .

Printing the Citation overview

You can print a list of citations (including all search results and saved lists), documents, and document references. Select the print icon to produce your desired output. For detailed information about printing, see How do I email, print, or create a bibliography, or save documents to PDF format?

Save to list

• If you are not signed into Scopus, you have the option to add selected documents from your results list to a temporary session-based list.
• If you are signed into Scopus, you have the option to save documents to a list which may be accessed anytime you are signed into Scopus.

For more information about adding a document to a list, see How do I add a document to a list?

View Cited by

To view a list of documents that have cited selected documents from your search results:

• Select the document(s) for which you want to see citing documents.
• Select 'View cited by' . A result listing of documents which site the selected documents opens.

Tip : The Cited by column shows the number of times a document has been cited by other documents in Scopus. Select the number to view the documents.

View references

You can view the references cited by the documents in your search results list. From the References list, you can output the references, view them on Scopus (if available), and view how many times they have been cited on Scopus.

• Select the document(s) (up to 2,000) whose references you want to view.
• Select 'View references' . A results list opens listing the documents references.

Create bibliography

• Select 'More' > Create bibliography' . The Print, email, save as PDF or create a bibliography page opens.
• Select 'HTML' or 'Text' for the desired format.
• From the Style drop down, select the desired bibliographic style.
• Select 'Create bibliography' . QuikBib opens in a new window or tab, displaying the new bibliography for the document(s).

Show all abstracts

Select 'Show all abstracts' to display or hide the abstracts in your search results.

Search results are sorted by date, most recent first and appears as Date(Newest):

• Documents with unknown publication dates are treated as the oldest articles
• Sorting applies to the entire set of results, not just the 2,000 displayed at the time
• The sorting option you choose will remain selected for future, signed in sessions, until you change it

Select a sort parameter from the Sort on drop down:

Document information

The Document information section provides information about the documents list.

To view patent results, select the 'Patents' tab.

Similar to the Document results page, the Patents search page allows you to refine the results, sort, view patent information, and show the information in the patent text that is pertinent to your search.

A secondary document is a document that has been extracted from a Scopus document reference list but is not available directly in the Scopus database since it is not indexed by Scopus. For some of these documents, limited functionality is available on Scopus.

To view secondary documents, select the 'Secondary documents' tab.

Similar to the Document results page, the Secondary documents search page allows you to edit the search, refine the results, sort, export, view cited by documents, and create bibliographies, as well as print, email, and create PDFs.

Because many of these documents are not available on Scopus, you cannot open the document or view the abstract. For some secondary documents, only certain fields in the citation are available to search. For example, if you search the Abstract field, and an abstract is not available for the reference, that reference is not included in your search results.

Mendeley is a reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Select 'Research data' to open the Mendeley data screen in a new window.

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Related Articles:

• How do I use the Analyze search results function?
• Scopus tutorials
• What is Scopus Preview?
• How do I manage my Saved searches?
• How can I best use the Advanced search?

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Searching Scopus: Using Scopus

Created by health science librarians.

About Scopus

Basic search, advanced search, author name search, citation searching, creating alerts, exporting items to citation managers, analyzing results, create bibliography.

• Comparison between Scopus and Web of Science
• Journal Metrics
• Helpful Resources and Tutorials

Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources with tools to track, analyze, and visualize research. Scopus provides access to a broad portfolio of peer-reviewed content from around the world. 

Scopus includes the records from the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases , among other included sources. Scopus uses four broad subject areas:  Physical sciences, Health sciences, Social Sciences and Life Sciences . 

Scopus allows users to:

• Search for articles, conference proceedings,trade publications, and book chapters on a topic
• Find author information, such as H-index, and lists of publications
• Locate Impact metrics for a journal title using SNIP, SJR, and CiteScore
• Perform citation searches on known articles
• Identify promising journals in which to publish
• Match an organization with its research output
• Locate potential collaborators or subject experts
• Manage your impact with your ORCID ID
• Set Citation Alerts

Search Form

Below is the Scopus search screen. Enter your first search term into the search field. If you have more than one concept to your search, select "Add Search Field" to add additional search fields, or conduct separate searches and combine them later using the "Search" button. 

Scopus does NOT have MeSH terms  or other subject headings on which to search. 

Scopus defaults to searching an article's Title, Abstract and Keywords.  You can change this in Advanced (see the tab to the left for information on Advanced searching).

Adapted from Rush University Library's  "Scopus User Guide" .

On the Advanced search form, you can create a search using field codes, proximity operators, or boolean operators to narrow the scope of the search.

To create an advanced search, Click "Advanced Search" from the main search page

To search for keywords in an article's  title or abstract , type in  TITLE-ABS before your search terms.  Be sure to use parentheses!  For example, this is correct:  (TITLE-ABS( children OR pediatrics))   but this is not correct:  TITLE-ABS children OR pediatrics

When doing a Boolean search, Scopus insists that parentheses be used correctly.  If you get a message about a Syntax Error, check your (( )).

Scopus needs Boolean operators (AND, OR) to be capitalized.  To exclude in Scopus, you must use AND NOT (not just 'NOT').

Scopus is a great place to look for information about a particular author's published works.    You can start your search for information on Scopus's main search page by clicking "Authors."  While Scopus is a compilation of peer-reviewed articles, it is not comprehensive, so keep in mind that you will only see information about the articles that have been indexed into Scopus.

Type in the author's last name, and first name if it will be helpful to locate them.  It is often a good idea to put an Affiliation as well.

The author's information will appear.   To see all their published work that has been indexed into Scopus, click the box in front of their name and then click "Show documents."

If you are checking on your own citations and notice that you have more than one listing, click "Request to merge authors."

If this is your information and there are multiple BOXES for your name, you can merge them by clicking the "Request to merge authors" link and following the steps.

For a visual representation of this author's work, click the box for All, then "View citation information."

• Scopus Advanced Search Video Tutorial

To find citation counts in Scopus

• Go to the  Scopus database
• Search by the document's title
• In the results list, look in the far-right hand column for the citation count.
• To see what documents cited the document, click on the citation count.

By registering as a Scopus user, you are able to create search, document, and author alert s to stay up-to-date at your desired frequency. Use these alerts to receive email notices when new documents are loaded on Scopus. From the Alerts page, you can create alerts, view the latest results for an alert, edit alerts, and delete alerts. There is no limit on the number of alerts you can create.

A Search alert is a saved search that you can schedule to run at certain intervals. If any new results are found, you will receive an email with the first 25 results and a link into Scopus to access all new results. You must be logged in to set an alert or work with your saved alerts.

To set a new search alert:

• From the  D ocument Search page, perform a new search. The Search results page opens.
• From the search results page, click  Set alert . The Set Alert pop-up appears.
• Set the frequency and day of week to start alerts.

To set an author alert:

• From the Author page, perform a new search. The Search results page opens.
• From the search results page, click an author's name. The author details page opens.
• From the author details page, click  Get citation alerts . The Set Alert Author Citation Alert pop-up opens.

To set a document alert:

• From the Document search page, perform a new search. The Search results page opens.
• From the search results page, click an document's name. The Document details page opens.
• From the Document details page, click  Set citation alerts . The Set Document Citation Alert pop-up opens.

To export items to SciWheel, EndNote, Zotero, or another citation manager, look in the grey bar (found at the top of your search results) for the words "RIS Export."   Note that you can also email citations (with links) to yourself in this bar.

You can export or email individual citations using the links in this bar, or you can save citations into a List and export/email the entire list at once by using the List function.  See "Saving Items in a List" in the tabs to the left for more information. 

The drop-down arrow next to "RIS Export" provides options for what information you'd like to export.  We recommend checking of all boxes so that all information is sent.

Clicking the "RIS Export" button will create a file that will be in your Downloads folder and will probably show in in the grey bar along the bottom of your screen.   Adapted from Rush University Library's  "Scopus User Guide" .

Analyze Search Results

Scopus offers several built-in functions for analyzing search results.  You can find these options here:

The analysis tools provide a summary view of aspects of the search results, such as counts of publications:

• By document source (ex. Journal Title)
• By affiliation (author organization)
• By document type (ie. journal article, book chapter, etc.)
• And several other criterion

With Scopus, you can create a bibliography of articles on the fly. 

1. Select the articles in your search set that you would like to include in your bibliography. You can do this by checking off the boxes of the articles you want, or by using the "add to list" feature to just add those articles you want. When you add the articles to the list, your list will open. From there, select all. 

2.  Click on the three dots at the top right that indicate "more menu options".  Select the option "Create Bibliography".

3. Select which format you want (HTML or text) and select the appropriate citation style. Click on "Create Bibliography".

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Mat136 - searching for articles.

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Introduction to Scopus and Web of Science

Scopus and Web of Science are the two largest interdisciplinary abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed literature in the sciences.  They both contain 10s of thousands of articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. 

Not everything contained in Scopus or Web of Science is full-text or comes from a scholarly publication. This guide will show you how to find full-text articles and how to identify the scholarly publications.

Scopus and Web of Science overlap a great deal in the publications they cover, but there are differences in their content.  If you are not finding what you want in one of the databases, try your search with the other.

Scopus and Web of Science are very similar in the way they function and how they direct you in your search for articles.  This guide will focus on searching for articles in Scopus, but the same method can be used when searching Web of Science. 

Finding Scopus and Web of Science

To use Scopus and Web of Science, you have to go to the University of Toronto Library's website.  You can access our webpage from www.library.utoronto.ca.

From the library page, go to Advanced Search and selected "Databases".  Links to Scopus and Web of Science can be found at the bottom the "Popular Databases" page.

Start your Search

When you are starting your search, think of the terms you might use to locate articles of interest to you. 

NOTE:  The broader the search term, the more results you will get.  For instance, in the example shown below, if only the search term "economics" was used, over 60,000 articles would have appeared on the "document results" list.

Making your search more specific brings up a more manageable set of search results.  In this instance, using the search terms "economics" and "farming" directed Scopus to narrow down the search to articles dealing only with the economics of farming.

For the purposes of this assignment, it will serve you best to limit your search to the "Title, Abstract, Keyword" option.  This will instruct Scopus to look for your search terms in the title of the article, in the abstract of the article, and the in keywords of the article.  The abstract of the article is a short summary of what the article is about and the keywords are search terms connected to the article that are often supplied by the author.

Further Refining your Search

In this example, using the search terms "economics" and "farming" still resulted in almost 5,000 records. Scopus gives you options to further refine your search and narrow down the results.  For your purposes, you can further refine your search to years the articles were published (you might just want search through the 5 most recent years); subject areas to further focus your search on your area of interest; and/or document type to limit your results to articles only.

After Identifying an Article of Interest

Neither Scopus nor Web of Science will allow you to search for differential equations or integrals within an article, so when you have identified an article of interest you will have to skim the text of the article to see if it includes the math you need for this assignment.  You can only have access to the full-text of articles if you see the "full-text" button under the title of the article.  If the article you are looking at does not contain differential equations or integrals, you can access articles similar to the one you have chosen by clicking on the title of the article or clicking on the "related documents" link. 

References and Citations

When you click on the title of the article, you will be taken to a page that shows you the abstract and keywords of the article.  This page also features links to the articles that the author used for her/his own research (references) and articles published more recently that have used the paper as a reference (cited by).  If the article you have chosen does not have the necessary math within it, you might find what you are looking for by scanning the papers included in the references and cited by links.

Web of Science

Searching for articles in Web of Science is fundamentally the same as searching in Scopus.  Like Scopus, Web of Science allows you to limit your search results, retrieve full-text articles, and have access to "references" and "cited by" links. 

Note: There is difference in some of the terminology used by the two databases.  In Web of Science, " Topic " will perform the same search that " Title/Abstract/Keywords " performs in Scopus.

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6 simple search tips: Lessons learned from the Scopus Webinar

Sc_blog_6 simple search tips_revised_pic 1.png.

First, it’s important to know that the data in Scopus is highly structured; every piece of information is tagged, even down to the initials of the author inside an article’s list of references. This is what ensures that your search will be precise and return reliable results and is also what differentiates Scopus from web search engines.

Here are 6 key things to keep in mind when searching in Scopus:

try it in Scopus button.png

1. Loose phrases vs. separate words

One of the most important things to remember, and easiest to misunderstand, is searching phrases. If you do not specify anything between two words, Scopus automatically joins them with AND, so the words in the phrase may not be searched together. You’ll get more results, but that maybe what you were looking for.

TIP: To search for a phrase in Scopus use double quotations marks (“). Doing so tells Scopus this is a “loose phrase,” meaning that the words must be together and will allow for wildcards and lemmatization (finding both singular and plural forms, see below).

Example: "conversion disorder"

• Enter conversion disorder in the search form and Scopus interprets it as ‘conversion’ and ‘disorder.’ You results could find documents relating to both “ disorders of vision ” and “ image conversion”.
• Whereas, when you enter “conversion disorder” (with the double quotations) Scopus looks specifically for the words ‘conversion’ and ‘disorder’ to be together in the fields you are searching.

SC_Blog_6 simple search tips_Revised_pic 2.png

2. TITLE-ABS-KEY is the default search field

Sc_blog_6 simple search tips_revised_pic 3.png.

Why? Because Scopus is an Abstract and Indexing database, meaning it provides you with key information and metrics for scholarly literature across 7,000 publishers, but it does not contain the full-text. Following standard science conventions, these three fields contain the most relevant information and provide the best starting point:

• TITLE: Should contain the most relevant terms to the literature
• ABS: The article abstract should be a condensed summary of the full-text
• KEY:  Author keywords express what authors or journal editors consider to be important keys to the article content. Indexing vocabulary terms from subject-specific databases like EMBASE, MedLine and Compendex are also included in the Keyword search.

If you are looking for a topic covered by a specific author, source, affiliation, etc. you can choose to restrict your search to a specific field, or add another search using <Add search field>.

3. Know what Scopus search does automatically. Use curly brackets { } if you want to search for an exact phrase :

• Accented characters : work with or without the accent included

Example:  Dvořák and Dvorak both return the same results

• Lemmatization: (similar but not quite the same as truncation or stemming) means that singular and plural forms, and well as adjectives, will be found if you type any of the variants. You can override this behavior by using the EXACT PHRASE marker—accolades or curly brackets—which will give an exact match of what you type (this does not apply to accented characters). See bulleted point below.

 Examples : attack and attacks; wide and wider

• Equivalents: will find the equivalent terms/symbols

Examples: ω and omega; behaviour and behavior

• Punctuation: Commas, hyphens,?, !  etc., are ignored
• Stop words: Words like “the,” “it,” and “of” are excluded from search (Refer to the list found in Scopus help)
• Override with Exact phrase : { } will find only an exact match for a word, phrase or character (including stop words)

4. Use proximity operators to find words near one another

By including proximity operators in your search, you may find articles you might otherwise miss. There are two proximity operators you can use:

• Preceding (Pre/n): The first word must be no more that (n) words apart from the second word
• Within (W/n): It doesn’t matter which word comes before the other

Example for Pre/n: You are searching for content related to zika virus.  You could do a loose phrase search (“zika virus”), which is a good start, but you might miss literature that talks about ‘zika and dengue virus.’

Instead, try to enter your search using: Pre/n: zika Pre/2 virus

This will find literature where ‘zika’ precedes ‘virus’ within 2 words, such as both “zika virus” and “zika and dengue virus”

Example for W/n: Enter your search using the within operator, for example: zika W/2 virus

This would look for ‘virus infection with zika,’ ‘Virus like zika,’ ‘virus, zika,’ ‘zika virus,’ etc.

SC_Blog_6 simple search tips_Revised_pic 4.png

5. Wildcards

In any word or “loose phrase” you can use wildcards to help when you’re unsure of spelling, or when a word has multiple spelling variations, or if you’re looking for chemicals. There are two wildcard types, ? and *.

• ? represents any single character

Example: wom?n retrieves both woman and women

• * represents any number of characters, even zero

comput* returns computer, computers, computerize and  computerization

*tocopherol finds α-tocopherol, γ-tocopherol , δ-tocopherol, tocopherol, etc.

6. The Scopus help files are your friend

As you build your search, you can always refer to the “ search tips ” button in the top left corner of the search form (or use the ‘Help’ button in the top navigation bar) to access helpful information on search syntax and access tutorials.

Scopus: How to use it effectively

What's in scopus, basic search, advanced search options, search hints, refine your search, analyze results, video tutorials.

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Students, faculty and staff at York College have access to Scopus on campus and remotely using the CUNY Login.

Scopus  is a large  abstract and citation database  of peer-reviewed journal articles, books, conference proceedings and patents. It includes:

• 21,950+ peer-reviewed journals (including over 3,600 full open access journals and "Articles-in-Press” from over 8,000 journals)
• 8 million+ conference papers (proceedings and journals)
• 150,000+ books & book series
• 280 trade publications
• 39 million+ patent records

Scopus does not have full articles, but it will link to the articles in York Library when available. For a very simple way to automatically get PDFs from Scopus, you can add the LibKey Nomad browser extension. (See also: installing LibKey Nomad )

Scopus Search Tips

• In the search box, enter your search terms or phrases. These are your topic keywords -- you might need to try combinations of keywords to find the most relevant results.
• Using the drop-down menu, choose the field that the terms should appear in. The default choice is Article title, Abstract, Keywords which will look for your keywords in these parts of every article. You can also choose other options, such as author or source title.
• You can add more text boxes by clicking  [+] next to the dropdown to add search fields. You can add as many as you like, but remember you can always add more later if you need them. Scopus has a "search within results" feature that lets you continue to narrow your search results as needed.
• If you use more than one text box, you need to select an operator from the drop-down list.

• AND: Results will contain ALL terms listed. This narrows your search.
• OR: Results will contain ONE of the terms listed. This broadens your search.
• AND NOT: Results must not contain this term. This helps exclude specific results.

Once you have entered your keywords, hit Search.

You can further  Limit  your search with additional options. 

• Published: Limit your search to articles published within a range of years.
• Added to Scopus in the last  n  days: Limit your search to documents that have been added to Scopus in the last 7, 14, or 30 days.
• Document Type : Article, Book, Review, Conference Paper, etc.
• Access Type: You can limit to Open Access documents only

You can also check out the Scopus Document Search Tutorial video , which will demonstrate how to enter search terms and specify fields, make a search more specific to narrow your results, and how to work with previous searches from the current session.

For more help,  contact a librarian  or check out this  tutorial on working with document search results .

On the Advanced search form, you can create a search using field codes, proximity operators, or Boolean operators to narrow the scope of the search. For example:

• ALL("ear infection") and AUTHOR-NAME(jones)
• TITLE-ABS-KEY(food allergies child*) and PUBYEAR > 2003
• SRCTITLE(*field ornith*) AND VOLUME(15) and ISSUE(3) AND PAGES(67-99)
• See  Field Codes  for more information on creating search strings.

To create an advanced search:

• Enter your search terms using proximity or Boolean operators as necessary to connect them.
• As you are typing, Scopus may highlight suggested codes, provide code definitions, and suggest examples that you may want to use.
• Click Search.

To view your search in outline form:

If you are constructing a complex search, you can click Outline query before you hit search to view your results in outline form.

• Outline query  lets you view your search in outline form. Results will display each section of your search starting with an operator on a separate line.
• Compact query  lets you return to the normal form of the search.

As always, you can  ask a librarian  for more help or check out the support center for more advanced search tips !

• Multiple words ( new york city ) entered into the search box will retrieve references containing ALL of the words ( new OR   york  OR city)
• Use double quotes to search for a phrase ("heart attack").     
• The asterisk * is the wildcard and will search for any word that starts with what you have before it -- toxic* will search for toxic, toxicology, toxicity, etc.
• Entering either British or American spelling (color, colour) will search for both variations.
• Searching for a singular noun (ribosome) will also search for plural nouns and possessives (ribosomes, ribosome's).

Search within Results :

• Use this search box to enter additional keywords to narrow your results.

Refine Results:

• Use the checkboxes in the sidebar to filter your results by year or date range, subject area, document type, source type, author, affiliation, and more.
• Limit to  changes the results list to display only the items you selected.
• Exclude  removes the items you selected from the results list. 

For any kind of search, once you have retrieved a list of documents, you can click the  Analyze Results  button in the top left corner of the results box to open up the analytics tools. Each tab contains data visualizations and charts that can downloaded, filtered, and so on. Metrics include publication year, source, authors, affiliations, country, document type, and subject area. 

Elsevier has created a number of visual tutorials to demonstrate different tools and techniques in Scopus.

You can find all the visual tutorials and text transcripts at the Scopus Support Hub .

Note that there is no sound for the following short visual tutorials:

• Searching for documents
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Learn how to confidently leverage Scopus to evaluate research. Participate in self-paced, online introductory Scopus training designed for researchers and students. Access the Scopus Academy landing page here .

Scopus is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, trusted abstract and citation database. Quickly find relevant and authoritative research, identify experts and gain access to reliable data, metrics and analytical tools. Be confident in advancing research, educational goals, and research direction and priorities — all from one database.

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Research Impact Metrics: Citation Analysis

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Introduction

Scopus is considered by many to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis and journal ranking statistics.

The Scopus web site claims this database is the "largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research." It is more international in coverage than Web of Science and the Scopus interface is simple and intuitive to use.

Find the Citation Count for a Publication

• Access Scopus (sign in for off-campus use, if necessary)  
• Using the drop-down menu on the basic search option, select "Source Title" then enter the title of the journal and click the search button.

• The resulting list of articles are all of those which cited something in the particular journal title you searched.

Be aware: The citation count will only include the number of times the publication was cited by articles from the journals that Scopus covers.  Scopus does not count citations from every journal published around the world, nor does this method count all citations from books, conference proceedings, dissertations/theses, patents, technical reports or other types of publications.

Find the Correct Author in Scopus

Author search.

Be Aware: Look at the subject area and affiliation for each author listed. Multiple listings may in fact be referencing the same person.

Finding an Author Profile

For a quick report on a specific author which contains detailed information including then number of documents by this author in Scopus, number of times the author is cited within Scopus, co-authors, subject areas, h-index and other tools to analyze this author click on the author's name. 

You can also access these same details on an author anywhere an author's name is listed within Scopus. Click on an author's name from a list of search results or from an individual title and abstract record. 

Analyze Search Results by Author Name

In Scopus you can analyze any set of search results to find useful information about journals, authors over time. This option provides charts and graphs so you can quickly see the journal titles where an author published the journals which have published the most articles from your search results. 

• In which journals has this author published?
• In what years?
• What types of documents; book chapters, editorials, research articles, etc.?
• What are the primary subject areas for a specific author?
• Search by author name

• Use the various tabs to see analyzes of where and when this author published, which types of articles or documents were published and in which subject areas. 

Analyze a Journal

Analyze a journal in  Scopus

• Find out which authors have published the most articles in a specific journal
• These authors' affiliations and countries
• Types of documents/articles published in a chosen journal
• Primary subject areas covered in a chosen journal

• Check the box to select all the results and then click on Analyze search results.  

Analyze Any List of Results

You may find interesting information about the history of terminology in a subject area by analyzing your results in Scopus. The example search below gives you some idea on when the abbreviation AYA started being used in medicine to identify the specific population group Adolescents and Young Adults in cancer research related to oncology. 

• Select all the documents from this search and click the link to Analyze results .  

Eliminate Self-Citations From a Citation Count

See the instructions for 

• Select the "Author Search" tab on the Scopus search page.
• Enter the last name of an author and the first initial for the broadest search.
• Select one or more names from the list of results, based on affiliation, subject area and location.
• Click on the "View Citation Overview" button at the top of the list of results.
• You will be taken to the Citation Overview page for this/these authors.
• In the "Overview Options" box at the top of this page choose to exclude "self citations from selected authors" by checking the appropriate box.
• Click the "Update Overview" button to remove these self-citations.

Create a Citation Analysis Report for a Department or Research Center

For approximate* results for analyzing research output of a specific department or school within an institution use Advanced search in  Scopus.

• From the default search form, select the Advanced search tab
• From the list of advanced search codes double-click on the code AFFILORG, which stands for Affiliation Organization. Double-clicking the term will add it to the advanced search box. 
• In the parentheses following this code in the search box enter the name of the university or institution and combine it with w/5 followed by department or school key words

Example searches:

• AFFILORG ("University of Michigan" w/5 "psychology")
• AFFILORG ("University of Michigan" w/5 "school of social work")
• AFFILORG ("University of Michigan" w/5 neurosurgery) 

NOTE: Connecting terms with w/5 means simply means you are searching for these phrases or key words within 5 words of each other in this field. This method can be used to refine any search in Scopus and the number can range from 0 to 255. 

Once you have a list of results using this search you can select the entire list and analyze search results and view citation overview reports get information on publications written by your specific school, department or institution. 

* For a more thorough method of evaluating scholarly output by school or department perform author searches for each individual within a department or school and then combine these searches using search history and the connector OR, under advanced search.  It is also important to note that Scopus does not have complete citation information for articles published before 1996.

Determine What Journal Articles Have Cited a Publication

This section will explain how to find the number of times a particular article has been cited within the Scopus database.

• For any title in a list of search results, scroll over the number at the far right of the document record. You will see that this number is the times others have cited this article.   

• The number of times an article has been cited by others is a form of measuring the value of that article. 

Find an Author's Most Highly Cited Paper

• Access Scopus ​
• Follow the instructions above for Author Search.  
• Click on the appropriate authors name to view all articles written by this person.  
• The list of documents associated with an author is sorted by date, with the most recently published document at the top of the list. To change this sort option so that you can quickly see the articles cited the most by others click on the  "cited by" link at the top, right of the list of results. This will re-sort the results so that the most cited article is at the top of the list. 

Find the Most Highly Cited Papers in a Journal

This method can only be used for journals covered in Scopus; variant citations are not included in the citation determination.

• Access Scopus (sign in for off campus use, if necessary)  
• Use the default search option "document search" but select  "Source Title" from the dropdown menu, enter the full journal title and click the search button.  

•   On the results page, click on the column header "Cited by" at the far right to sort the resulting articles by times cited. The article which has been cited the most times will appear at the top of the list of results.

Set Up a Citation Alert for a Journal Article

• Access Scopus (sign in for off campus use, if necessary)
• Use the "Document Search" or "Author Search to find a specific article. 
• Click on the title of the document for which you want to receive notification when it is cited. 
• In the Cited by box at the right, click on the "E-mail Alert" link.

• To edit or remove an alert, click on the "My Alerts" button at the top of the page, just under the Scopus header; when your alerts are displayed, click the "Edit" link to edit the alert or select the alert and click the "Delete" button a specific alert from your list.  Alerts are automatically set for one year.

Trade Uncertainty and U.S. Bank Lending

This paper uses U.S. loan-level credit register data and the 2018–2019 Trade War to test for the effects of international trade uncertainty on domestic credit supply. We exploit cross-sectional heterogeneity in banks’ ex-ante exposure to trade uncertainty and find that an increase in trade uncertainty is associated with a contraction in bank lending to all firms irrespective of the uncertainty that the firms face. This baseline result holds for lending at the intensive and extensive margins. We document two channels underlying the estimated credit supply effect: a wait-and-see channel by which exposed banks assess their borrowers as riskier and reduce the maturity of their loans and a financial frictions channel by which exposed banks facing relatively higher balance sheet constraints contract lending more. The decline in credit supply has real effects: firms that borrow from more exposed banks experience lower debt growth and investment rates. These effects are stronger for firms that are more reliant on bank finance.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve System, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. We are grateful to Michelle Alexopoulos, Chris Boehm, Nick Bloom, Valentina Bruno, Steven Davis, Lorenzo Garlappi, Kristine Hankins, Tarek Hassan, Dalida Kadyrzhanova, Matteo Iacovellio, Abel Iglesias, Seung Lee, Ralf Meisenzahl (discussant), Lubos Pastor, Diane Pierret (discussant), Andrea Polo (discussant), Andrea Presbitero, Veronica Rappoport (discussant), Brad Setser (discussant), Bo Sun, Eugene Tan, Lena Tonzer (discussant), Liliana Varela (discussant), and Frank Warnock. We thank Stephanie Sezen, Diego Silva, and Kelsey Shipman for research assistance. We are grateful for useful suggestions from participants at workshops, meetings, conferences and seminars.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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How Much Can Trees Fight Climate Change? Massively, but Not Alone, Study Finds.

The research, which comes with important caveats, was partly an effort to address the scientific uproar surrounding an earlier paper.

By Catrin Einhorn

Restoring global forests where they occur naturally could potentially capture an additional 226 gigatons of planet-warming carbon, equivalent to about a third of the amount that humans have released since the beginning of the Industrial Era, according to a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature .

The research, with input from more than 200 authors, leveraged vast troves of data collected by satellites and on the ground and was partly an effort to address the controversy surrounding an earlier paper. That study, in 2019, helped to spur the Trillion Trees movement but also caused a scientific uproar.

The new conclusions were similar to those in a separate study published last year . Mainly, the extra storage capacity would come from allowing existing forests to recover to maturity.

But major caveats remain: If we protect all current forests, where will people get timber, rubber and palm oil? Would forests be able to store carbon quickly enough? And how much forest carbon would be lost to fire, drought and pests as climate change intensifies?

The 226 gigatons of storage cannot be achieved without cutting greenhouse gas emissions, said Thomas Crowther, the study’s senior author and a professor of ecology at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland. “If we continue emitting carbon, as we’ve done to date, then droughts and fires and other extreme events will continue to threaten the scale of the global forest system, further limiting its potential to contribute.”

Forests are essential to tackling both the climate and biodiversity crises. They offer food, shelter and shade to humans and countless other species. They clean our air and water. And they pull climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. As the climate crisis intensifies, that ability has made them controversial: How much can we rely on trees to get us out of this mess?

Dr. Crowther was the senior author of a polarizing study on forest carbon in 2019 that drew scientific backlash but also inspired an effort by the World Economic Forum to grow and conserve one trillion trees.

In 2019, he acknowledged, careless language led to trees being wrongly painted as a silver bullet for climate change. Now, his biggest fear is that countries and companies will keep treating forests that way, using them for carbon offsets to enable the continued use of fossil fuels.

“We are all terrified that this potential of nature gets misused,” Dr. Crowther said. “Nature has such spectacular potential to help us tackle global threats, but it will be devastating if major organizations use nature as an excuse to do more harm to our planet.”

The World Economic Forum’s tree program, 1t.org, was started with funding from Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and endorsed by figures from then-President Donald Trump to Jane Goodall. Dr. Crowther himself, a charismatic and media-savvy scientist , is an adviser to the group.

His new study’s number of 226 gigatons of carbon approximates his previous one of 205, but it gets there very differently. Both papers exclude urban areas, croplands and pastures but include rangelands, where animals may graze at lower densities. In the new research, 61 percent of the additional carbon storage would come from protecting existing forests and the other 39 percent from growing trees in deforested areas with low human footprints.

In the 2019 study, all the carbon came from growing trees where they could occur naturally outside of existing forests. More than 50 scientists published seven critiques in Science that year, disputing both the analysis and its implications. One accusation was that the study endorsed inappropriate tree planting on grasslands and other nonforested ecosystems, destroying native biodiversity. Another was that the estimates of carbon storage were far too high for the amount of land concerned.

Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at University College London, submitted one such critique in 2019. But the new study, he said, was “reasonable.”

Still, he emphasized that carbon drawdown from forests should be kept in perspective. “There is still only a finite amount of land to dedicate to forests,” he said, “so only a small fraction of the potential carbon uptake has a chance of being realized.”

Another critic from 2019, Joseph Veldman, a professor of ecology and conservation biology at Texas A&M University, praised the enormous amount of data the study brought to bear but said its findings still relied on inappropriate densities of trees in landscapes where they exist naturally but should remain sparse, like savannas and deserts.

Despite global pledges, leaders have struggled to rein in deforestation. Last year, the world lost 10 percent more primary tropical rainforest than in 2021, though Brazil’s current government has made recent progress .

Restoration efforts have also proven problematic. In the name of fighting climate change, countries and companies have often invested in failed mass tree plantings or monocultures of commercial, nonnative species that hurt biodiversity. While the latter might grow quickly, they sequester only half as much carbon over time, Dr. Crowther said.

He emphasized that restoration should be driven by local communities that choose to work in concert with nature to help themselves. A nonprofit he founded, Restor, connects community projects, like an agroforestry farm in Ethiopia, with potential supporters.

“Instead of removing the forests to grow coffee, they instead keep the forests standing,” Dr. Crowther said. “And because the forest captures water and nutrients, those trees grow really well without the need for fertilizers or irrigation, and as a result, nature makes their farm more productive.”

It’s unclear how much such efforts can scale up. Matthew Fagan, a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who works on global forest monitoring, said he believed the new estimate was too high because it did not account for people and fire.

“The fact that it aligns with other rough estimates of global carbon owes more to the unfortunate reality that they share methods and data sources in common than to the truth,” he said.

He and other scientists also raised concerns about the warming effects that trees can have in colder and drier climates as they absorb heat that would otherwise have been reflected by snow or grass.

But there is one thing they all agree on: To tackle both climate change and biodiversity loss, the world must do far more to cut fossil fuels and end deforestation of old-growth forests.

Catrin Einhorn reports on biodiversity for the Climate and Environment desk. She has also worked on the Investigations desk, where she was part of the Times team that received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its reporting on sexual harassment. More about Catrin Einhorn

Learn More About Climate Change

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Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans

• The race to build AI as smart as humans, or AGI, looks like it suffered a major blow.
• Google researchers found the transformer technology behind AI isn't very good at generalizing.
• "We shouldn't get too crazy about imminent AGI at this point," one AI expert told Insider.

Google researchers may have just given a major reality check to the ambitions of CEOs in chase of AI's holy grail.

In a new pre-print paper submitted to the open-access repository ArXiv on November 1 , a trio from the search giant found that transformers – the technology driving the large language models (LLMs) powering ChatGPT and other AI tools – are not very good at generalizing.

"When presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pre-training data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks," authors Steve Yadlowsky, Lyric Doshi, and Nilesh Tripuraneni wrote.

What transformers are good at is performing tasks that relate to the data they've been trained on, according to the paper. They're not so good at dealing with tasks that go even remotely beyond that.

That's a bit of a problem for those hoping to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) , a term techies use to describe hypothetical AI that can do anything humans do. As it stands, AI is pretty good at specific tasks but less great at transferring skills across domains like humans do.

It means "we shouldn't get too crazy about imminent AGI at this point," P edro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, told Insider.

AGI has been touted as the ultimate goal of the field of AI because it represents the moment, in theory, when humanity creates something that is as smart as, or smarter than, itself . Depending on your point of view, it's an alarmingly Promethean or an era-defining scenario. Either way, a lot of investors and techies are putting serious time and investment into getting there.

Standing on stage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday, for instance, OpenAI boss Sam Altman reiterated his desire to "build AGI together."

Achieving that means getting AI to do a lot of the generalizing tasks that they human brain can do — whether it's adapting to unfamiliar scenarios, creating analogies, processing new information, or thinking abstractly.

But if the technology struggles with even "simple extrapolation tasks," as the researchers note, clearly we are not close yet.

"This paper isn't even about LLMs but seems to be the final straw that popped the bubble of collective belief and gotten many to accept the limits of LLMs," Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan wrote on X . "About time."

Jin Fan, senior AI scientist at Nvidia, questioned why the paper's findings were a surprise to people as "transformers are not elixirs."

Ummm ... why is this a surprise? Transformers are not elixirs. Machine learning 101: gotta cover the test distribution in training! LLMs work so well because they are trained on (almost) all text distribution of tasks that we care about. That's why data quality is number 1… https://t.co/G5mBuX6O36 — Jim Fan (@DrJimFan) November 6, 2023

The research highlights how "a lot of people have gotten very confused" about the potential of a technology being touted as a path towards AGI , said Domingos.

"This paper that just came out, it's interesting who it's surprising to and who it's not surprising to," he added.

Though Domingos acknowledges transformers are an advanced technology, he believes a lot of people think they're a lot more powerful than they actually are.

"The problem is that neural networks are extremely opaque and also these LLMs have been trained on unimaginably large amounts of data which got a lot of people very confused about what they can and can't do," he said. "They start thinking they can do miracles."

Transformers' opacity and the scale of the data they're pretrained on gave some the illusion that they generalize beyond it. But now the truth is out, and it's clear they're not the road to human-level intelligence. https://t.co/lVqSowU5CD — Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) November 6, 2023

More advanced forms of AI may do a better job of generalizing. The Google researchers used a GPT-2 scale model rather than something more current like a GPT-4 scale model.

Sharon Zhou, CEO of Lamini AI , told Insider she doesn't find it troubling that transformers may struggle to generalize.

"It's why I started a company that trains models, not just queries them, so it can learn new things," she said. They can still be very useful, and still be steered and aligned."

Watch: How humans can communicate with aliens