Library Orientation for Residents and Fellows

This guide provides information about using Scopus to find articles and citations. 

• Use Scopus when you would like to see results similar to an article you've already found
• Scopus is great for identifying a specific author's scholarly output
• Scopus can return results ranked by number of times cited, as well as ranked by relevance or date
• Scopus often contains live links to the reference's full text
• Scopus is also good for "forward searching" as it shows who has cited an article (with live links to those citations as well!)

Scopus is a large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and web sources. It includes:

 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).

To find works by a particular author, choose "Authors."  There is more information about conducting author searches in the tabs to the left.

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').

If you want to search on individual topics and then combine searches (i.e. you are using a PICO format), here are the steps to combine your various searches. One important thing to remember:  Scopus only saves your searches until you log out, so you'll want to get this done in one sitting.

1) run your various searches.  It's ok to do several tries on a search.

2) when you're ready to combine them, click on Search again.

3) the next screen brings up your searches.  Click on the ones you want to combine.  Scopus will combine them in the order given. This only matters if you need the final search string to be in a certain order.

4) once you've got the boxes checked off, click "Combine Queries.'

5) A box will appear above.  Here you can choose whether to combine using AND (most common) or OR, or AND NOT.  When you've chosen that, hit Enter or Show Results.

The next screen will have your search results.