Life Beyond PubMed: Searching with SCOPUS

1
Life Beyond PubMed Searching with SCOPUS

• Blair Anton, MLIS, MS
• Welch Medical Library
• banton2_at_jhmi.edu
• [phone]

2
Agenda

• Overview of SCOPUS
• Content and Coverage
• Special Features
• Sample searches and demonstration

3
SCOPUS Content

• Elseviers multidisciplinary bibliographical
  database of abstracts and citations
• Records extracted from other Elsevier databases
  (Embase, Biobase and Geobase)
• ISI Web of Science competitor
• Includes 100 of Medline titles

4
SCOPUS Content

• Bibliographic Abstracts and Citations
• Quality Web Resources
• Scirus search engine
• Patents

5
SCOPUS Coverage

• Numbers
• 29 million records of abstracts and citations
  from 1966 to present
• 265 million references from 1996 to present
• 15,000 peer-reviewed journal titles
• 4,000 international publishers

6
SCOPUS Coverage

• Numbers
• 500 Open Access Journals
• 700 Conference Proceedings
• 600 Trade Publications
• 125 Book Series

7
SCOPUS Coverage

• Scientific Fields Only
• Physical sciences (5500 titles)
• Health sciences (5300 titles)
• Life sciences (3400 titles)
• Social sciences (2850 titles)
• Strongest in biomedical and geosciences

8
Searching SCOPUS

• Controlled vocabulary from Medline (MeSH) and
  Embase (EmTree)
• Author key words (natural language)
• Basic, Author and Advanced Search Interfaces
• Spelling suggestions for lt50 hit retrieval

9
SCOPUS
10
SCOPUS Results Display

• Source Titles
• Author Name
• Year
• Document Type
• Subject Area

11
SCOPUS Limiter Options

• From Basic Search Page
• Date range, document type, or subject area
• From Results Page
• Refine results to source title, author name,
  document type and subject area
• Search within results box

12
SCOPUS Output Options

• Using the Output Link, select citation format
  and
• Export selected results to text files or
  bibliographic management software (RefWorks)
• Print results
• Email results

13
SCOPUS Special Features

• Citation Searching
• Author Searching
• Alert Services
• Lists and Profiles
• Bibliographic Management RefWorks

14
Special FeatureCitation Searching

• Citation Tracker
• Allows easy back and forth reference searching
• Citation Overview
• View citations by year in table form

15
Special FeatureAuthor Searching

• Author Identifier
• Disambiguates author names
• Clusters similar and separates dissimilar names
  by affiliation, coauthor and citation data
• Includes author data detail links
• Offers exact name searching option

16
Author Searching
17
Special FeatureAlert Services

• Email
• Saved Search Strategies
• Citation Alerts
• RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feeds
• Requires RSS Reader (Aggregator)
• NewsGator
• Google
• Yahoo

18
Special FeatureLists and Profiles

• My Lists
• Use Add to List link to temporarily save
  selected citations from an individual search
  session
• My Profile
• Store saved search strategies, permanently saved
  lists and citation alerts here

19
Special FeatureBibliographic Management

• RefWorks
• Select articles
• Output button
• Direct Export to RefWorks
• Export button
• New RefWorks window will open

20
SCOPUS Some Limitations

• No controlled vocabulary database
• No allowance to view search query translation
• When using advanced search field features, web
  and patent results are not included

21
SCOPUS A Summary

• Bibliographic literature, Web resources and
  Patent information
• User-friendly browsability for
• introduction to a new topic
• range of perspectives for background
• Citation searching
• Author searching
• Alerting and citation management services

22
Questions?

• Thank you!