Scopus General Information
What is Scopus?
- ScopusScopus is an interdisciplinary citation and abstract database covering nearly 40,000 titles (including 24,600 active titles), of which a majority are peer-reviewed journals.
Scopus can be used to identify highly cited authors and institutions, authors writing in specific journals in a field, and much more. It can also be used as a quality filter in research for finding "highly cited" papers that match your keywords, using the feature of sorting results by the number of times cited in other scientific papers.
Accessing Scopus
Visit the Himmelfarb Library homepage at himmelfarb.gwu.edu. In the box labeled Popular Resources, under the Databases heading, click Scopus.
Scopus Tutorials
Video tutorials courtesy of Elsevier Scopus Support Center
How to Conduct a Basic Search
How to Use Advanced Search
How to Expand Your Search
How to Download and Export Your Search Results
How to Save Searches and Set Alerts
Scopus Tutorials (cont.)
Scopus is a powerful database with tools that can do a lot more than basic literature searches. The links below will take you to short tutorial videos and text created by Scopus.
Analyze your search results
- View all of the documents cited by your results, or all of the documents which cite your results
- View and download charts that break down the results by subject area, document type, year of publication, and more
- Discover which authors have written the most documents in the results by looking at Author Name in the left-hand filters
Learn more about every article
- View article metrics including citation count, FWCI, and PlumX altmetrics
- Discover which institutions funded the research by looking for Funding Details on the article's page
Use Scopus Sources, a collection of journal data
Find author information
- View all the documents an author has written
- View the author’s h-index, a measure of scholarly impact
- Discover which authors they work with most often
- View and download charts that break down the author’s output by subject area, document type, year of publication, and more
- Make corrections to your own author profile (For more information on this, check out Himmelfarb Library's complete Researcher Profile Audit Service guide!)
Scopus Tip: Refine Your Results
When you have run a search, you can use the filters on the left-hand side to narrow down the results. These filters include open access, year, document type, source type, language, and more.
How to Filter by Date
Go to the Year filter. The number to the right of each year tells you how many documents were published in that year. Click "View all" to see the entire date range. Select one or more years and then select either "Limit" or "Exclude". For example, if I select 2022 and 2021 and select "Limit," I will now only see the 64 results published in those years. If I select 2022 and 2021 and select "Exclude," I will now see all of the results except the 64 published in those years.
See which authors have written the most documents
Go to the Author Name filter. The number to the right of each author tells you how many documents within the results were written or co-written by that author. The authors are listed in order of most documents written. In the example here, you can see that Moss-Morris, R. wrote the most documents within the results, 19. Select one or more authors to limit the results to their work or to exclude their work from the results.
