What is Scopus?
Scopus is a citation database paid for by the library and available to users on the Washington University network or via a library proxy account. Scopus covers 22,000 journal titles and 150,000 books with over 70 million items and 1.4 billion cited references back to 1970. It also contains over 16 million author profiles and 70,000 institutional profiles.
When might you use it?
- Scopus is useful for literature searches and is frequently selected for use in systematic reviews.
- Scopus can identify the research output of our institution and some of the institutional ranking organizations use its data.
- Scopus can help you tell the story of your research impact by providing publication and citation counts for your work.
How do you get started using it?
If you click on the link to Scopus from the Becker Library website, the main landing page will open and you will start on the “Document Search” Tab. You can also select tabs to search for authors or affiliations.
For a simple search, you can find documents by searching the title, abstract and keywords fields.
You can then narrow your results by time range, language, document type and others.
- Scopus lets you sort your search results by citation count, which can help you identify publications that are the most highly cited in your research area. (Click screenshots to enlarge.)
- Scopus includes the list of references of an article – so you can jump to those quickly. You can also export a list of references very quickly using a variety of export options such as CSV, RIS Format (EndNote), plain text, etc. Scopus also offers the option to create bibliographies formatted in 11 different citation styles including the National Library of Medicine citation style.
- You can search by an author name to view all the works in Scopus attributed for an author. The Scopus author algorithm creates author profiles by looking at author names, email addresses, affiliations, subject areas, co-authors and citations. However, algorithms aren’t perfect. Scopus relies on author and institutional feedback to help correct errors. If you have more than one profile, you can ask Scopus to merge the profiles. There is also an Author Feedback Wizard from Scopus that can help too.
Want Becker librarians to check your Scopus author profile? Email us at publicationsupport@becker.edu
When wouldn’t you use Scopus?
Scopus covers a lot of books and journals but no single database can cover everything — Scopus has better coverage of the sciences than the humanities. Scopus does not search the full-text of articles and books and it does not cover meeting abstracts. It is also not a point of care tool so you would not use it at the patient bedside.
Need help?
The librarians at Becker Library are ready to help with your searches. We regularly use Scopus for systematic reviews, citation analysis, grant acknowledgement reports, promotion and tenure reports and more. We are also happy to verify your author profile. To request any of these services or personalized training on Scopus, please contact: askbecker@wustl.edu.