How to Export Reference Lists from Scopus (or Web of Science) to Excel? | Step by Step
In this video i'm going to show you how you can export your search results from scopus to an excel sheet. Scopus does have an option to directly export it to excel however on many occasions it. We found that the excel file is completely empty. So if you are facing that issue follow these steps and you will have your results in an excel document. So first thing we will do a search on scopus. This was a search that i ran and which gave me 344 results. I have selected all the results and i can choose the option. There are many options. But i will choose this this option which is ris export so here you can also export in other formats and you can also see there is option for csv excel but for some reason that is not working properly so we will choose ris as the export format and click the export button once you click on the export button. You will see the file downloading here it may take some time depending upon how many documents or how many search results you have so this is now downloaded. I'll now go to another software called as jabref. It is a reference management software if you do not have it you can search jabref and download it and install it it is fairly straightforward to install. Once you have jabref installed click on file. Go to import and choose import into new library. Go to your downloads folder. Or wherever your ris file is downloaded just now and open that depending upon the size of the results it may take a while for it to be downloaded. All right you can now see. There are 344 entries in my jabref library okay. The next step is to go to file use export and select export all entries when this dialog box opens make sure to choose csv this one open office csv file and give it a name at the bottom. It will say that this has been successful. What we do next is open the excel document. Once you have done that you will see the file opens like this. There are a lot of different columns here with different information. The most important ones for example is the title the name of the journal which here it was published and depending upon how you want to use the information.
There is a lot of information here that you can what is not very clearly visible here is the column custom. 1 is in fact the abstract so you can rename that and column 3 or sorry custom three is the keywords so what i may do is just highlight sorry not highlight that. Just hide some of the information that i don't need during my evaluation of my literature and only keep those things that i want to use all right so this now gives me the all right. So now i have the title of the paper. The journal in which it was published the year the abstract and the keywords to make it more visible or easy to use you can make it wrap wrap text so that makes the abstract section quite long all right so for the for when you're evaluating the literature if you're writing a systematic literature review paper one of the things that you need to do is to decide what information you are going to extract from these selected papers and to find that information and record that in the excel sheet is the easiest way to systematically organize your literature so to do that. Let's uh go back here and add a couple more rows all right so what i'm going to do here is let's say i'm going to write my research question. One and research question two okay. Suppose my systematic literature review has two research questions and to answer the research question. I need to extract two pieces of information from each paper so suppose for research question one. The first thing that i want to find out is what problem is addressed by this paper. And what was the solution that they developed and to answer the research question two i would want to find out what methodology was used. Okay so if i need to just find this information uh so if i have to answer this research question i need to identify this information from for research question one and this to answer my research question too. So let's say uh i'm not going to find the actual answer now but just to show you for example.
This is how i could identify the information that i need from each of the papers and this is called data extraction all right. So how can you do this so for doing that. One is you can read the abstract you can read the the title or you can read the keywords and see if that helps you to identify the question the answers to fill this up one easier way to do. This is to go to data and click filter so when i click filter you can see this arrow that comes up here what that does is it helps me to search for specific keywords within say for example in the title if i were to search the word retrofit i can see from the instead of 344 papers now i have 166 papers so what that means is if one of the way i want to categorize my literature was based upon the concept retrofit. There are at least 166 papers that talk about it in the title itself okay similarly you can do the same thing in the abstract and when i do this i get 303 so almost all the papers have the term retrofit in it similarly. I can do that for the keywords as well. So the reason why i'm saying you that is if you have to identify specific keywords. That help you to look for this information you can look it in this manner. Another example could be. Let's say in challenge. I say method this now. Give me a fairly short list but this could be that if i read through this abstract there maybe i can find out what method they have used or what methodology they have used. Okay so you can use this feature very nicely uh to work with the your journal uh publications that you have in your citations in your reference list okay so that way. You can systematically extract information from uh from the paper based upon what information you need to answer your research question. Okay so i hope that was helpful and you can now easily extract files from scopus and take them to excel and do further analysis and the same thing can be done from web for web of science or any other database that you're using as long as you can export the files from any database to the ris format and import that into jabref.
You can convert it to excel like this all right. I hope this video was useful and it will help you to progress with your research.
There is a lot of information here that you can what is not very clearly visible here is the column custom. 1 is in fact the abstract so you can rename that and column 3 or sorry custom three is the keywords so what i may do is just highlight sorry not highlight that. Just hide some of the information that i don't need during my evaluation of my literature and only keep those things that i want to use all right so this now gives me the all right. So now i have the title of the paper. The journal in which it was published the year the abstract and the keywords to make it more visible or easy to use you can make it wrap wrap text so that makes the abstract section quite long all right so for the for when you're evaluating the literature if you're writing a systematic literature review paper one of the things that you need to do is to decide what information you are going to extract from these selected papers and to find that information and record that in the excel sheet is the easiest way to systematically organize your literature so to do that. Let's uh go back here and add a couple more rows all right so what i'm going to do here is let's say i'm going to write my research question. One and research question two okay. Suppose my systematic literature review has two research questions and to answer the research question. I need to extract two pieces of information from each paper so suppose for research question one. The first thing that i want to find out is what problem is addressed by this paper. And what was the solution that they developed and to answer the research question two i would want to find out what methodology was used. Okay so if i need to just find this information uh so if i have to answer this research question i need to identify this information from for research question one and this to answer my research question too. So let's say uh i'm not going to find the actual answer now but just to show you for example.
This is how i could identify the information that i need from each of the papers and this is called data extraction all right. So how can you do this so for doing that. One is you can read the abstract you can read the the title or you can read the keywords and see if that helps you to identify the question the answers to fill this up one easier way to do. This is to go to data and click filter so when i click filter you can see this arrow that comes up here what that does is it helps me to search for specific keywords within say for example in the title if i were to search the word retrofit i can see from the instead of 344 papers now i have 166 papers so what that means is if one of the way i want to categorize my literature was based upon the concept retrofit. There are at least 166 papers that talk about it in the title itself okay similarly you can do the same thing in the abstract and when i do this i get 303 so almost all the papers have the term retrofit in it similarly. I can do that for the keywords as well. So the reason why i'm saying you that is if you have to identify specific keywords. That help you to look for this information you can look it in this manner. Another example could be. Let's say in challenge. I say method this now. Give me a fairly short list but this could be that if i read through this abstract there maybe i can find out what method they have used or what methodology they have used. Okay so you can use this feature very nicely uh to work with the your journal uh publications that you have in your citations in your reference list okay so that way. You can systematically extract information from uh from the paper based upon what information you need to answer your research question. Okay so i hope that was helpful and you can now easily extract files from scopus and take them to excel and do further analysis and the same thing can be done from web for web of science or any other database that you're using as long as you can export the files from any database to the ris format and import that into jabref.
You can convert it to excel like this all right. I hope this video was useful and it will help you to progress with your research.