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Libraries at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Scopus Library Guide

Rensselaer Libraries' guide for using Scopus - a multidisciplinary abstract and citation database. Includes tutorials for using tools for tracking, analyzing, and visualizing search results.

Scopus is a huge multidisciplinary database with citations and abstracts from peer-reviewed journal literature, trade journals, books, patent records, and conference publications.  It provides tools for tracking, analyzing, and visualizing search results.

  • Over 24,000 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide
  • Contains 79+ million records, with the most thorough coverage from 1996 forward.
  • Includes 10 million conference papers from proceedings and journals.
  • Approximately 3 million new records are added each year via daily updates
  • For more information about Scopus coverage, see the content coverage guide on the Elsevier website.

1. Search for:

  • Scientific and scholarly articles on a wide range of topics
  • Citations of articles (from 1996-)
  • Citation score of authors (e.g., H-index)

2. Set up alerts to track future articles:

  • On a specific topic
  • By a specific author
  • That cite an article of interest
  • That cite any article by a specific author

3. Analyze data (primarily from 1996 forward)

  • Information on author, article, and journal rankings.
  • Analyze a set of references by institutional affiliation of authors.

See Getting Started with Scopus for an overview of Scopus from its publisher, Elsevier.

Download the Quick User Guide.

View Elsevier's Scopus online resource for more information.

To personalize your Scopus account so you can use features such as email alerts, set up an account by following the 'Create Account' link in the top right corner of the Scopus page.

create scopus account

Scopus apps are available for iPhone/iPad and Android users.

Note: Full-text articles are not available, but you can search for, save and email and/or tweet abstracts and links to articles for later use.

Access:

  • You must first create a personal Scopus/Science Direct login on www.scopus.com (click on register at the top).
  • Next, download the iPhone app from the app store, or get the Android app from Google Play.
  • Login to the app with your personal account plus your institutional email address.

Hamerkop

Fun Fact:

The name, Scopus, was inspired by the bird, Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta), which supposedly has excellent navigation skills. [Burnham JF. Scopus database: a review. Biomed Digit Libr. 2006 Mar 8;3:1. doi:10.1186/1742-5581-3-1]

Photo by Charles J Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53832569

Thank you to the Librarians at the University of Washington Health Sciences Library for permission to use content from their Scopus guide!