Okay so thank you everyone for joining us. Um if you haven't already please uh take a minute to participate in our poll. Um it is mostly just for fun. Um but my name is samantha walsh and thank you so much for joining us for one of the levy library's first open instruction sessions via zoom for the spring semester. We have a lot more planned that i'll you know kind of quickly. Talk to you about at the end of the session but for now today we are going to be talking about uh scopus for searching so we will talk about what scopus is and kind of what you can do with it beyond searching in terms of you know yourself or your colleagues as authors and researchers but today we are going to focus um on scopus for searching and um my name is samantha walsh. I'm a librarian with the levy library. Um i have a colleague on this call as well lily martin and so if you have any questions throughout the session you can just put them in the chat and she will answer them. You're also very welcome to ask questions at the end of the session and if you have questions about this or other topics just moving forward you are always welcome to contact the library via our website. So today we will kind of first kind of talk about what scopus is and the situations that you would want to um search scopus in uh then we will look at scopus together and look at some kind of important and really useful features on there. Um then you know. I'll quickly kind of say like what else can scopus do that. I didn't go over and then they'll have some time for a q a so our pull. It looks like most people who have joined us have never used scopus but a few have used it many times or once or twice so thank you for participating there. So what is scopus. Uh so scopus is a multi-disciplinary source neutral abstract and citation database. So what does that mean. It means that scopus is a database. Um that is not um it's not dependent on kind of like you know this is the this is a database of journals all all published by elsevier because scopus actually is owned by elsevier.

But it's source neutral it's across discipline so you know unlike pubmed which is you know biomedical clinical it's across disciplines and it's an abstract and citation database. So what that means. Is you're searching the abstracts and citations and what that's what you can find within scopus. You can't always get to the full text. Scopus is more about seeing. What's out there then kind of ensuring that you're able to get to the full text of everything you find um but you know as your librarians. That's our job so if you ever can't get to something um we want you to ask us so it's also a tool you know because it's so large and because it is kind of um not kind of because it is multidisciplinary what's really great about scopus. Is that um it really gives a lot of insight um into publication trends um and kind of like where and from who your results are coming from a lot more so than uh some subject-specific databases and finally it's an author and citation-driven database. So you can get a lot of information about um you know kind of authors collaborating with each other. Um and uh you know kind of who's citing who and how many times an article has been cited and stuff like that. Uh so times that you would want to search scopus and i guess i kind of mean when i say why search scopus i guess i mean why search scopus in addition to or instead of pubmed and that's really just because for most of us pubmed is our first stop or maybe google scholar is our first stop but um i will kind of mention google scholar a little later. Um but times to search scopus would be if your research question doesn't fit into like a neat disciplinary box. So it's a little bit kind of outside of like you know the straight like biomedical clinical. Um you know uh research area or you know. Maybe it is um but you're having a hard time kind of finding a solid body of literature on your topic. Maybe because it's emerging or maybe just because you you feel like you might not be using the right keywords.

Um or if you're interested in understanding publication trends like who's citing who and stuff like that um or if you're interested in looking into specific authors or institutions and what's coming out of them or finally if you're interested in searching for conference abstracts in addition to full-length journal articles um and finally. This isn't the here. But um kind of just any time that you want to. Um you want to really feel like you've conducted a comprehensive literature search. You always want to search more than one database. Um so scopus is a really really great place to kind of be your second database in addition to pubmed because it is so multi-disciplinary and um easy to use and as i'll mention a little later kind of becoming even easier to use. They're always kind of doing redesigns and they did just do a big one on their homepage. So let's take a look at scopus so uh scopus is a database that we pay for um it's not you know it's not like pubmed where pubmed is freely available but the library pays for access to you know all of the journals that you'll find there we actually pay for the database itself um and because it is so popular we have it linked right here under popular tools on our home page and we also have it if you click databases that's where you can browse you know where we have over a hundred databases that we make available you can find it there as well as other databases as well but of course we'll use this nice easy button um and so oops my search from earlier is there. Let's just delete that um and so it's actually going to start you off on a page. That looks like this um and so where we see that. We're um we're searching for documents you can actually search for specific authors or institutions. Uh but today we're going to kind of talk about searching documents and this is considered their basic search page. Um i think it looks a little more than basic but this is their basic search page so a few things i want to point out.

Are that one really great thing with scopus is that you know exactly what you're searching. For example i know in pubmed it just says all fields um with the basic search like you're just searching all fields and they're like well. I don't know what all the fields are so here. We know exactly which fields we're searching and we can change it if we'd like for example. If we want a really really specific search we might choose to search just in the article title. Um because that would be you know it's like okay. I need this keyword in the title. That means it's going to be like very important. Uh to this article but for now i'll search article title abstract and keywords and so i will search natural language processing and i'm going to say or text mining so this or is something that you can use in pretty much any database um including google scholar including scopus where you're just saying okay. Give me natural language processing or text mining or both actually and that's just to kind of account for the fact that for a lot of concepts there are multiple terms. Of course these two don't mean the exact same thing but for the purposes of our research we've decided that we'll kind of take either or and we'll get the same idea so we'll click add search field to search kind of another concept and we're going to combine that with and we're going to say okay give me anything with natural language processing or text mining in the title abstracting keywords. But then i'm also going to need epilepsy or epileptic or seizure. And so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put this little asterisk after seizure because i want seizure or seizures um of course i could just write that but if i click search tips i'll be taken to a page that teaches me that i can use this truncation symbol this little asterisk to um to do this and this is also something that you can do in pubmed and some other databases as well and so i'm going to click search and so there's a few things i want to point out so the first thing i want to point out before we even start to look at the results is this really really i think.

Unique feature on scopus where we can click analyze search results. And we're taken to a page that analyzes the 94 results that came up so if we say okay this is you know i. I put a lot of thought into this search and i'm thinking this is pretty much the body of literature on this topic. Um what can i. What do i want to understand. Not about the articles themselves about like the nitty-gritty but about kind of like publication trends in this area and so what scopus helps me do very visually is understand kind of when you know when these publications are coming out. Um who. They're coming from where they're coming from and even kind of like what type of documents are being produced um you know full talk full full text journal articles conference papers etc. Um so there's a lot you can kind of do in here to understand again not not the articles or the you know the science specifically but more kind of trends um so then what i want to kind of next point out is our sort by feature which they actually call um sort on um so which i find kind of interesting and maybe a little european or something. Um but we when i'm searching basically any database what i like to do is i like to toggle in between date newest and relevance um relevance because obviously we want to see what's the most relevant to my search and date new is because you know you kind of always want to see what's kind of the the newest the newest publications in a certain area but something that you can do in scopus that you cannot do in most other databases is you can also sort by cited by highest and lowest. So i can search i can choose cited by highest and then and it'll load i hope um okay so it should load and what i'll see is of my 94 documents. Um i will see the um the highest sighted coming to the top and for whatever reason it's being a little strange right now so we'll we'll give it a minute.

Um but that's a really great way to kind of quickly and easily discover the um like the the preeminent papers or the kind of like um you know the touchstone papers in a certain area and what i like about this is that we're telling it that that's what we want it to do. Um for uh so. This is something that google scholar actually does for us as well. Um but we don't actually know that google scholar is doing that. Um because it's google and because of the algorithm we basically kind of just quickly get you know new and or highly cited papers right at the top but we don't get to choose how it's sorted so we don't always understand. Why is this coming up first and so it unfortunately really kind of potentially perpetuates these publication trends without people really realizing whereas in scopus we're kind of making the decisions ourselves and so a few other things i want to point out are the filters on the side here uh so. I don't have time to kind of discuss every filter but the ones i wanted to kind of really point out are the author name filters so what's really useful here is again when we're researching in a certain area. We can very quickly see. Okay who are the major authors that are publishing in this area like who should i be aware of um and then we can also take a look at subject area so this is very very useful to me when i'm doing a search um so for example. Let's say i was doing this search and we were like okay like we understand that this is an area that is kind of um you know informatics based but then there will also be articles about like you know the real clinical application of natural language processing for epileptic patients. And i'm actually really only interested in those um you know those clinical application papers. What i can do is kind of quickly limit to the specific um the specific areas. I'm interested in so i would probably leave out computer science and i would limit to like medicine.

Maybe neuroscience probably health professions to kind of get rid of the um the papers. I'm not as interested in and this subject area filter is typically based on the um the journal that the paper is from next. I want to point out the affiliation filter so again this is a great way that we can kind of. In addition to that analyze page. We can see where these papers are coming from where this research is being conducted and then finally document type is a very very useful um filter especially if we are you know searching here in scopus as well as pubmed um because scopus will have conference papers conference abstracts that are not in pubmed. Pubmed will actually never have um conference abstracts every once in a while they slip there and they're on accident but clicking conference paper and conference review and then limiting is a great way to see like okay. What am i missing in pubmed. Let me quickly see what i'm missing there and then finally one other thing i wanted to point out was this uh search within um search within feature here uh so. Let's say i was like. Oh wait i totally forgot that. I'm only interested in um articles about children or child or adolescents and so i can quickly search within my 94 results which you know you can do in a lot of other databases but sometimes that's just you know redoing your search so they make it really really easy here and so i want to move on and let's actually see if we can get this cited by highest to work. Okay yes now it's working for us um and so i want to move on and take a look at an article page itself because there's so much going on here so kind of the first and most important thing i want to point out is how do we get to full text uh so we have two options here we have find it levy library and view at publisher so unless you're on campus i really really recommend clicking find it levy library um if you click view at publisher it'll bring you to the publisher's page and you'll almost always hit a paywall even though we pay for this article sometimes so if you click find it leavey library that'll bring you to our catalog and the entry for the article itself and then you'll see a few different access points and you can just choose however you'd like to access the article every once in a while it will be an article we don't subscribe to you know a journal we don't subscribe to so instead of this here what you'll see is request via interlibrary loan and you should always request it via interlibrary loan if you've gotten r because i wouldn't want you to kind of miss out on something relevant just because we don't subscribe to it next i want to point out the cited by section so this will say okay this was cited by 147 papers and what i can do is i can actually take a look at all of them and i can even click here and view them in like search results format and i can start you know sorting um sorting those by the highest scientist or highest cited or searching within those um and so it's a really great way to kind of you know fall down a rabbit hole and like jump from um jump from article to article um of course we have our abstract and what i want to point out is oh okay so this is a little different this is not the um the article i looked at earlier um but what we have here which i think is really really cool and useful is we have indexed keywords so when we search in pubmed or medline we search we might start using mesh terms when we search in mbase we might search using entry terms so these are terms that in those specific databases are tagged onto articles to make them more findable for us so scopus actually doesn't have its own controlled vocabulary because it's so multidisciplinary but what it does have is you know for the for the other um for the other databases that this article might be in so i'm assuming it is in some engineering databases as well and also in entry it'll say well in those databases this is how they tagged it so it can really really help if you're having a hard time coming up with a search and coming up with keywords finding just one or two relevant articles in here and looking at these terms is very very helpful uh so continuing to scroll down i want to also point out that we can very easily take a look at the article's references and so of course if we just you know download the pdf we could see the references as well but we can't easily click through to full text we can't easily see how many times each one has been cited and so this is a really useful kind of easy format for us as well and finally we have this related documents option so i will say that this for me is very hit or miss so what we can do is we can say okay show me related documents based on the keywords in the article or based on the authors so that'll be kind of like what else have these authors published what else have their collaborators published etc and so typically when we click keywords we are taken to a search results page with um pretty much just an always absolutely insane number of results um so sometimes it's worth trying but i would say the second you click this you want to start searching within the results as well so another thing that i want to point out is the author profile so i did say earlier that um this is a this is a database that's really focused on authors and citations and kind of the connections between articles and so a big part of that is that every author with an article in scopus so you know in this case for this articles there's many authors and so each one of them has an author profile and so if we take a look at um let's go back to that main search so if we take a look for example this author has published you know the most articles or you know he's tied for the most articles in this in our search so if we limit to just their articles we can actually click their name and we're taken to uh their author profile so this is uh so it's possible you've seen the scopus author profile before and this doesn't look familiar that's because they did very recently redesign this and it looks much looks much more like professional and clean in my opinion um but what we have here is a situation where we have their affiliation and this person has actually gone in and added their orcid id so that's something you can do as well um but what we can see as you know.





Readers is um kind of an overview of their of their contributions of their um of their publications. Um but what's really really useful because like i said i want to focus on the the search aspect of this and not the um not the like you know analyzing your own research aspect is we can potentially see okay. What else um what other aspects of this topic is this author covering that might not be showing up in my search by seeing all of the documents they've published as well as a list of their co-authors and all of the documents that have cited their work so again you can definitely fall down a rabbit hole but sometimes in the beginning of your literature searching. That's you know that can be really fun and eye-opening in my opinion. Uh so finally i want to go back to the main page and take a look at advanced search. Uh so like i said earlier i do feel like this. This interface is pretty advanced and we can do a lot here by adding you know kind of as many lines as we'd like but if we click advanced document search there is one cool thing we can do that. I want to point out so when we're here we don't actually have those that drop down of field codes where we can choose okay. We'll search the title abstract keywords. We'll search the title. We actually have to choose over here on the right how we'll search and so i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to do. Title abstract keywords i click the little plus sign so i'll do the same thing again natural language processing or text mining. And now what i'm going to do is i'm going to say okay. How do i want to combine them.

I want to combine this with my next concept with an and i want both now. I want to do the same. Um and i'll say i want you know like it before at the lep or epilepsy or seizure spell that right. I'm still not spelling. It right oops um but now. Here's what i can do. That's unique here in the advanced search that i think is very very useful. Sometimes i can say okay. I want natural language processing and or text mining in the concept of you know in the vein of epilepsy or seizures but i also want to think about this in terms of like a monitoring or alert system but i found that you know the words monitor and alert are just everywhere in the literature so what i can do is i can actually say i can use this w within and i can say okay within three words so in the title abstracting or keywords. I need epileptic or epilepsy or seizure within three words of monitor or alert again. Spelling correctly is important. Um so that'll be my same search so this is obviously a very very specific search. So there's only two articles that kind of fit that vein but it is really really helpful when you're like i'm getting so much because i'm searching the word. I don't know aspirin but i need to search the word aspirin but i'm just getting so much extra stuff so that's a really really useful tool um that is you know not available in a database like pubmed. Um so there is definitely a few things that i have not been able to touch on about scopus that if you're interested i really recommend um kind of exploring on your own and or reaching out to us so if you feel like you will find yourself on scope as quite a bit. I definitely recommend um in the top right just making that personal account where you you know you have your own login to scopus so you can save searches. You can create alerts so that you're let so that you know scopus alerts you. When a certain article gets cited um you know and a lot more than that another thing is kind of the author level metrics so like i said i wanted to focus on searching um but if you are interested in your own author page on scopus we are happy to help you kind of clean that up if it seems like.

There's a little bit wrong there if you want to attach your orcid id stuff like that. So it's definitely something worth looking into. If you've published a bit you can also search patents on scopus and it does work really well and is really easy. I just didn't touch on it mostly because we didn't have time and also because i need to learn a little bit more about how they get that information in there and then finally like i said they are in the process of a redesign. So um you know even in preparing for this session i noticed some new features that i hadn't seen before and i think some new ones are to come so there's a lot going on in there and so are there any questions or anything. Anyone wants me to kind of go back and take a look at. I'm going to just point out because i did mention making an account so this is where you would do that up in the top right create account. Thank you all for coming you.