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Scopus User Guide: Searching Scopus

This is a user guide based on Elsevier's guide and tailored for NU community to navigate Scopus while searching relevant information for their research and educational purposes

Search

In Scopus, you can search by Documents, Authors or Organization. For details of the Author and Organization search please see the Author and Organization 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:

  • Enter your search terms into the Search documents box [1]
    • 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]

Video Tutorial

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

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 ‘Secondary documents’ above your search results.

Analyze Research Results

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