| 0

Smart ways to quickly find

the best academic
literature

Lucia Schoombee, Customer Consultant Research Management

(l.schoombee@Elsevier.com)

2 November 2016

https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus
 | 1
|

What will follow?

1. Choose the right database

2. Learn a few tips and tricks
3. Analyze your search results
4. Find related material
5. Focus on the most-cited and
most-shared material
 | 2
| 2
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

1. Choosing the right database

Why is this important?

1. Comprehensive / International
2. Multidisciplinary
3. Diverse publication types
4. Relevancy
5. Scholarly (peer-reviewed?)
6. Full-text availability
7. Powerful search options but easy-to-use
 | 3

Comprehensive

Scopus includes content from more than
5,000 publishers
62M records from 22K serials
Updated daily
Records back to 1823
Articles in Press from > 3,750 titles
3,715 active Gold Open Access journals
indexed

Source: November 2015 title list at https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/content * Available late 2016

 | 4
| 4
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Multidisciplinary
 | 5

Diverse publication types?

JOURNALS CONFERENCES BOOKS PATENTS*

21,568 peer-reviewed journals 90K conference 531 book series 27M patents
361 trade journals events 30K Volumes / 1.2M
7.3M conference items From 5 major patent
Full metadata, abstracts and papers offices
cited references (refs post- 119,882 stand-alone - WIPO
1995 only) books - EPO
Funding data from Mainly Engineering 974K items - USPTO
acknowledgements and Computer - JPO
Citations back to 1970 Sciences Focus on Social - UK IPO
Sciences and A&H

That has been enhanced with

Authoritative Author & Affiliation Profiles for all records 1823-forward
Additional enhanced metadata, ex. Medline & other index terms, Funding
Acknowledgements, etc.
 | 6
| 6
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Relevancy
40 different languages covered
105 different countries
Citations for all articles 1970-present
Abstracts
 | 7
| 7
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Scholarly & Reputable

Scopus titles are selected by
the independent Content
Selection & Advisory Board
(CSAB)

Scopus is endorsed by the

major world university
ranking organisations such
Minimum Criteria:
as QS, THE, Shanghai, US
News, etc. Peer review
Abstracts (English)
Regular publication
References (English)
Online
 | 8
| 8
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Full-text
Click this link to view the full text of the article. The link appears
only if you are entitled to the full text of this article. If not entitled,
your librarian may arrange to use this link to display an alternate
page.
 | 9
| 9
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Powerful & Easy-to-use

 | 10
| 10
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

2. Learn a few tips & tricks

1. Use clever operators

2. Filter
3. Refine
 | 11

Use operators

Boolean operators
- and, or, and not
Proximity operators
- pain W/15 morphine finds articles in which "pain" and "morphine" are no
more than 15 terms apart.
- behavioural PRE/3 disturbances finds articles in which "behavioural"
precedes "disturbances" by three or fewer words.
To find exact phrase use braces
- {oyster toadfish}
To find loose phrase, use double quotation marks
- heart attack
Use * to replace any number of characters
- he* will match any word starting with he, such as he, her, help, hello,
helicopter
Use ? to replace one character
- he? Will match hem, hen, etc.
 | 12

Refine and filter search results

o Year
o Author Name
o Subject Area
o Document Type
o Source Title
o Keyword
o Affiliation
o Country
o Source Type
o Language
 | 13
| 13
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

3. Analyze results

Determine the publication trend of the topic to

ensure you identify the top journals, authors, etc.
for the particular topic.
In Scopus Search Results can be analyzed across
seven elements:
Year
Source
Author
Affiliation
Country
Doc type
Subject area
 | 14

Publication trend Growth in subject area

Provides trend information to indicate whether the topic is increasing or decreasing

in interest and productivity. Useful tool to facilitate chronological reading of the
literature or focus on high productivity periods.
 | 15

Identify top journals

Bradfords law = Within any subject field, a small number of journals produce the
majority of the essential literature. Important to determine the core journals of a
given subject area.
 | 16

Identify core authors

Lotkas law = In any given subject field there are a small number of highly
productive scientists and a large number of scientists with low productivity.
Important to find the core authors by looking at their volume of publications in the
field.
 | 17

Identify which document types are most prevalent

Document type is useful for knowing what type of literature to focus on

books vs articles, etc. (Although Scopus currently contains mainly articles,
book content is being expanded rapidly). For getting an overview of the
literature click through to the Review Articles.
 | 18

Make use of the sub-disciplinary categorisation

Get a sense of the different themes (subject areas) related

to a topic and select one or more to focus reading.
 | 19
| 19
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

4. Find related material

When you have identified a relevant document, try

to find documents that share the same references,
keywords, or authors as the current document.
 | 20
| 20
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

5. Focus on most-cited and shared

Citation is a widely excepted indicator of a

publications significance (its contribution to the
development/understanding of a topic).
Similarly social media activity provides very
valuable information about the novelty of a
research result based on the fact that it is more
immediate and comes from a more diverse
audience (practitioners, educators, and the general
public)
 | 21
| 21
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Sort by . Cited by
 | 22
| 22
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Document level metrics

Scholarly Activity
(E.g Mendeley
readers)
Scholarly
Commentary
- Altmetric.com
- Blogs, Wikipedia
Mass Media
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Google+
- Reddit
- Pinterest
 | 23

Demonstration
 | 24
| 24
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

Conclusion

1. Scopus is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary index of high

quality scholarly material which covers a wide range of
publications which has powerful search capabilities and is
easy to use
2. Scopus empowers you to find relevant academic material
quicker through allowing you to analyse your search results,
find related material and focusing on most-cited and shared
publications
3. Scopus includes several more features such a alerts,
downloads, creating bibliographies, journal metrics, h-index
and more..
4. Tune in for more webinars on these topics
 | 25
| 25
TITLE OF PRESENTATION

FollowElsevier Africa Latest News

on Facebook & on the blog

Blog.Scopus.com
 | | 26
| 26

Thank you
l.schoombee@elsevier.com