Scopus Ready for 2023!
Good afternoon everyone. We're ready to get started. I'm going to hand over to toureya to um start with a short introduction to Rhea would you like to go ahead thank you. Lucia thank you foreign Lucia please. Can you activate the chat for us to send messages to all the attendees um the check is activated it activates only for you and the uh panelist for me okay. I hope Karima has the hand to to share the the link um foreign foreign foreign I just want to introduce myself. I'm Lucia scumbi senior customer consultant for research intelligence for elsevier. I'm based in South Africa. My specialization area is in um you know scopus and civil and other of our research intelligence. Solutions which I've been working with with for more than um nine years at the moment um so. I'm very pleased to be with you today. This is the beginning of the year. So we want to make sure everybody's ready for scopus for the year and today we're going to um you know look at some of the fundamentals and some of the new things but before we go there um. I'm not sure I thought I had activated the check but it doesn't look like it is so please use the Q a box if you want to communicate with us and and we'll keep track of that. Thank you very much. Um so just to make sure that you do know that we are recording this session and we will make it available after the session on the website where. I which I will share with you at the end of our session and there are also certificates available so have your camera ready because we've got a QR code and you can you know copy that and then get access to your certificate so looking before we go into today's session. I just want to uh so this is on the right hand side but we have upcoming webinars as well so to keep a look out for those uh we will cover be covering a number of topics about scopus until mid-year and then we will bring out a new set of of webinars so next week already. We will be focusing on on a new topic which is um the literature review for today's session.
I'm going to do fundamentals of scopus um just as a recap many of you already know scope as well. This is a refresher. I'm going to focus on one use case. I'm going to do a document search or a literature search but I'll try to touch on all the most important functionalities in scopus and then as we go along I will also highlight some of the new features so these are not always very new features but there are less used or less familiar features so I want to make sure everybody knows about them and also understands you know what they mean and and how you can use them. So these new features include pre-prints policy references indications where Publications link to sustainable development goals and also searching by Open Access state. This is right so before we get to that. I'm just going to do very quickly a few slides before we go online just to recap on. What is a scopus. I'm going to switch off my camera now to have more bandwidth right. So just you know what is scope is it is a global multi-disciplinary database for discovering academic literature and it also. It's also a visualization tool which you can analyze your search results and find metrics about publication so that you can also measure research performance right um so going. I'm mentioning that this is a subscription based um database but it is Source neutral Source neutral means. Uh that scopus covers a large number of of publishers. I will show you that might just see. My mouse is stuck right so you can see here that we are covering more than 7 000 publishers and that includes then serial titles as well as books so a larger number of Serial titles the active the number of active serial titles Journal titles is now more than 27 000. um we have more than 250 000 books in scopus and all of these. Publications are also linked to a an author and it's linked to an affiliation right so the these that it Aggregates it pulls together all the publications of an institution as well as of an uh author profile of authors and it uses an algorithm to do that so it does that automatically will in one of the subsequent webinars we will talk about author profiles specifically and how to correct an author profile and so.
I'm not going to focus on that today. I'm going to focus more on these 90 million items that we have in scopus these are the public applications and that is what I'll focus on today. On the right hand side you can see all the different use cases of cyborg so you can use cyborg. Scope is to uh to find journals to analyze journals. You can look at a researcher's impact you can decide or find other. Researchers or authors to collaborate with the focus today is going to be on finding the current research so what has been published in a specific research area that is our. Focus today so just more about um scopus. I'm not going to talk about all these numbers it's important to know that scopus covers journals and the articles in the journals and conferences books and patents patents it covers where a publication is linked to a patent. It's not a patent database in itself but you can find patent information as well right so these are the different document types that are available in scopus and then on the left hand side. You can see a covers. It's multidisciplinary so it covers all the broad subject areas physical sciences. Health Sciences social sciences and Life Sciences right so multidisciplinary covering different um types of Publications and for the rest. I'll I'll go online into a scopus itself and then we'll start with the fundamentals right so I'm just going to share my um it's a shame like browser before I go is the uh. Is there a question that I should attend to now at the stage. That doesn't look like it okay so. I'll continue because we don't have a lot of time right. So this is the the scopus um home page you get access to your scopus home page via your University was also available um via email. Which is you know which is bringing scopus to you.
Basically um what. I want to say in terms of using scopus before we get started. I'm going to use an example an example I. I hope you will like because it will bring back good memories for you but in terms of using scopus optimally it is important to sign on so. I'm already signed on you can see my profile is active LS if I click on here. There's a sign out. Um if if you are not signed in it will not it will show sign on it. Will they will show an option to sign on. Disable scope is sorry. So if you sign on you will have access to more functionality in the sign on mode which is basically when you're using it as a registered user you can save your results you can save your searches you can set up alerts and you can set up your preferences for exporting as well right so if you are not signed on these functionalities are not available to you and you know as you can think these are very useful so that you don't have to recreate your search strategy every time you want to do a search so I'm going to use cyborg with an example to show you the fundamentals of finding you know publication in the research area as you can see from the home page the screen it's optimized for searching you can it says start exploring and you can start exploring either documents authors or affiliations right so I'm going to start with with documents the authors and affiliations is a um a grouping of the Publications but by author or by Institution and it you when you do a author search you go directly to the author profile that you're looking for or to the affiliation profile so we're not going to cover that today we'll cover that in other webinars we're going to focus on documents documents means academic papers it can be Journal articles it can be book chapters conference proceedings because there are so many types of academic Publications we just call them documents and when you do your search you can search in in many fields so every research article is indexed into different fields and you can search in those specific fields so if I if I click on the Arrow you can see all the different fields so if you want to search in the if you're quite confident that your keyword is must be in the in the title of the Articles you can use it article title as the field that you want to search to your search in if you want to have a broader search you keep with article title abstract and keywords that is also the default so my search query that I'm going to have is about um football because I think Morocco is now very famous for football um and so football soccer is my example and I'm going to combine that with other Search terms for instance I also in specifically I want to look at injury so basically when you do your search um terms or you start your terms you divide yours your search into different concepts so the first concept is football the second concept that we're looking for is injuries around football so I'll use the asterisk and asterisk is one of the operators that help you to be more accurate in your search and if you want to find more of these operators you go to search tips and you will learn more about these operators which are very useful.
I'm going to add another um a keyword or concept here I'll do say hamstring for example just to make my search a little bit more narrow. I can't just do football and then we'll have thousands of Publications right so we've got three concepts. We've got football we've got injury and we've got the specific part of the body hamstring and uh with that. I'll just activate the search and wait for the results so you will see that. I'm using the new layout of the scopus interface right in the previous layout you only you saw only the um the results you didn't see the actual search page as well as the results. It's just a a slight difference. Everything that was on the old layout is still on the new layout it's just a little bit differently organized um but. I'm just mentioning in case this looks a little bit different to you.
This is the new layout so. I'm just going to scroll down because now I can see my results on the same page. It's already starting on the same page and the first thing that you can see is that we've got 1066 documents. Publications that were found and here on the left hand side. We've got this filter panel. The filter panel helps you to refine your search query according to more specific variables or more specific um you know aspects of of the search that you would want to focus on and one of these is that is that you can filter by. Open Access right so open access. All of these different categories do not in they do not affect you as a searcher open is open you know. Open Access means that it is full text but some research managers um or you know in the institutional planning for a university are actually interested in the different types of open access. It doesn't influence the the author you know when you find an open access publication with its green gold or bronze. It doesn't affect you know how open it is. It is just it is it will be available full text but what the significance is of this is that uh scopus is a bibliographic database so the default is that it does not include uh full text but if the author published whether whether with the option of Open Access which actually means that the author pays a fee up front an article processing fee up front to to make sure that this article is available um you know full text for everybody then it will become then only. Is it available in full text in scopus right so you can see of the 1066. Publications we found they are 458 which are open access and what these other functionality these are the you know categories mean in the green means that when the author published uh the the accepted manuscript version of the of the of the publication uh was added to an Institutional Repository so many universities have repositories they keep track of their researchers Publications they you cannot put a a published version unless it's open access in your repository but you can put your article or your accepted.
Awesome version you can add to the institutional repository and all Publications that are in institutional repositories are called Green open access. If it's cold. It means that the article was published in a journal where the whole Journal is is open access right so if you have a say you know you have a pub you have a journal title like um nature cancer and the and they only publish Open Access that means that to the journal is open access and the article is also gold open access and then bronze is where the publisher made a decision where they use the discretion to make an article Open Access so it could be because it's in the interest of Public Health or to accommodate an author or they have many reasons why they would decide we are going to at no cost to make this article Open Access or freely you know full text for everyone to see hybrid gold means that you publish in a journal. That is a subscription-based journal but you pay an additional fee asking that your specific article is made. Open Access so it could be in a journal where the other Publications are not Open Access. They're not full text but your article in that journal is full text so these are the different categories of of Open Access and we make this available mostly for administrative you know users where Administration wants to keep track of what types of um Open Access is used but for the user for the researcher for the author looking for literature. These categories are no different to each other. They just mean that it's full text available so that's the the one um you know that. I wanted to mention about one of the less used features. I would say um but that can be very useful because if you want to focus your search the search that we're doing now on football if you only want to see those results that have uh um you know full text attached to it then you can select open all open access and you can limit to that and it will limit you will only see open access so the further implication of Open Access is then if you find an article like this one was published this year.
And you you click this article. There is a pop-up that will lead you to the full text right so here you can see view. PDF but there will also be a on the right hand side a flag a red flag that will tell you this is a full text or PDF that you can download. I think my sister. My internet is a bit slow. Maybe that's why it's not showing or I can just try another one so there are different ways that you can find the full text. Let me just see if this one is so here already. You can see it's open access. I'm selecting this one if I don't have to I can just click on the title so this is the the little red arrow or the red pop-up that shows you where you can look at the PDF. That's the one way to find it. The other way is there's usually an option view. PDF so that is all about full text but getting back to our results so here we have our 1666 documents and there are various ways of course that we can filter now we can refine this search by uh you know selecting a shorter time range so we can see say we don't want all. Publications we want only the Publications from 2014 onwards and we just type in the dates and uh you have to always remember to scroll down sorry right to the bottom so that you can. Oh sorry now. They've moved this to the topic since so you can just um oh you select once you've selected it it automatically will then filter by that by what you've typed in. There are other filter options as well so by author by subject area. So if you're interested to only see those. Publications that the journal is classified as a medical journal or for Health Professions. Then you can look at those only if you know you only want to look at review articles the 94 review articles. Then you select review and you can limit that that was what I was looking for you have to select and then limit so I'm not I just want to show you also the journal title.
You can also focus a filter by a specific further keyword. So if you don't if you're not interested in publications related to female football players but only male you can select mail as one of the keywords to add to your search strategy affiliations you know the institutions where they're coming from and also you have a view on the on the funding sponsors. So after you've done your filtering the next you know function that is very useful in scopus is to analyze your results so analyze your results basically gives you a summary of that research field so here you can see the first publication about football. Injuries went back to 1969 and then from about 2010 it started increasing and there's been quite a focus on injuries in football so publication. This is definitely a topic that is or a research field that is increasing in. Its um it's more it's becoming more popular um so of and when you hover over one of these you can you know you can select it and then you can open up all the Publications that were published in 2012 or 2016. So you can it helps you to read chronologically um and also to see the trend of publication over time. If you scroll down you there's another window that shows you which are the journals so that are focusing most on these on on this topic and you can see it's the British Journal of Sports Medicine of the 1066 81 articles were published in this one. Journal right so British Journal of sports medicine is an important journal in this field. It's important in the sense that the most the volume of Publications are here but this does not give us an indication of how prestigious or how good the journal is it just tells us in a lot of Publications about football is in this journal if you want to know more about the quality of the journal itself then you click on this chart ready let me just click on the chart you know I clicked on the wrong place.
Let me just go back you know. Just give me a minute. I the internet is a bit slow it seems I'll just do the analyze results again and show you if I scroll down we were looking at the the sources the titles of the journals in this field and when you click on compare sources and view site score this is an indication of how important the journal is in terms of the site the sightedness of the journal so if you look at this well. British general of sports medicine is not only the journal where the most or the highest number of publication. It's also the highest ranking journal in this field it has a site score of nine of now it is 21.3. Which means on average articles in this journal get cited 21.3 times. It's an indication that it's a good journal in the sense that it is very highly cited. It has a high average number of citations per article. So you can feel confident when you're citing papers from this journal it should um it should be good articles you know in. Broad Strokes basically then you can also see the top authors so it orders for you are the top authors in this field. And then you can for instance you can go to a specific author and find more information so the top author in this field is a bar. Click on the and then it takes you to the author profile of the most prolific author in this field where you can see you know where what are the topics that the author is focusing on the number of Publications the age index the number of citations that this researcher has received so far so you get a full overview of the actual researcher that is considered as you know having published the most in this field. Oh gosh you know. I'm there's something in my screen that I can't there. You go back to my results again. Just want to close these additional windows and go back there we are was. And then scroll down and you can see other windows as well which gives you this trend overview of the field where you can see right so the UK US Australia um of you know they are the Nations that leading in this field but there are also other countries that have published in the field of um you know football so you just scroll down and you can then also select by the country so I was hoping to see you on the Rocco published two of these Publications right.
Um and scrolling down you can also see the types of documents here so most of these. Publications are articles and then there are also a few review articles and that's very useful because if you click on the review articles you can start your reading process by you. Know reading the review articles. Just make sure that you make your your search strategy a little bit more condensed not so many. Publications and then the subject area you can see is mostly in medicine and the funders here you can see. Also what is the which a funding organization is funding Research. In This research field right so analyze your search results. I I think it's a very useful um tool that we're having in scopus because it gives you that overview of your of your research field it shows you the trends and the most important researchers and countries in this specific research field. And then if you if we go further then you can also uh you can now export this this list. I would say the first thing to do always is to save your search because you can be interrupted and you might have spent a lot of time on your you know which words which keywords to use and you don't want to do that again so save your search first um so that you don't have to repeat that. I've already saved my search and then if you are happy with you know your results more or less at this stage then you can also set a search alert so that when new documents are added for this search string you get an email you'll get you can choose okay it once a month once a week every what day of the week and you can set your alert to be updated about new Publications and what else can you do with this. Uh with these search results is you. Can you know you can.
It's of course you have to read the abstract so read the abstracts activate the abstract. So that you can see whether it's useful for you um and then also you can sort them. Um so you've got we've got them by date now so the most recent but you can also look at um the most highly cited you know so make sure that you know which ones of these have been cited the most um because obviously that shows the importance of the of the article. Um and then you can select. If you've read the abstract you can select your your Publications and then you can export them. There are different exports that you can choose from so there's CSV respects Etc so CSV would you you can transform into Excel mendeley. If you're using mendeley as a reference manager endnote um zotero uses risk um so you can export into these different reference managers if you select a download so the difference between exporting is it if if I select for instance I'll show you if you select CSV and then you export the reference only and you can decide what components of the reference you want so you want the author the title The Year the source title all of these. If you're not using a reference manager you must think about these and then you can export them and you can export up to 20 000 of these public you know. English in this manner if you select download download means that you are going to download the free. The the uh full text so download is full text export other. You know citation information. It's the it's it's the reference information that you will be downloading or exporting. Sorry export right so that's that's the different downloads are limited to 50 downloads. At a time right so. I've only got three here if I select download. It will download in the full text of these three articles if the full text is available. If it's not available it will say. I cannot download because it's not full text right so these are important you know utility functions of of of scopus where you can download you can export another important thing to do is to um is to save your list so as you saved your search you can also save these results that you got if you can't read through them now you just save the list and then you can go back to that list by using your profile go to your profile and you'll see oh yeah all my saved lists or all my saved searches and you can organize your alerts here as well so this sign on information is is very useful so now looking at the detail of these references that we have received you know these documents that we identified so if you click on the the title it will take you through to the the page The Details page of this publication and you will find more information here so you can see the error once again where it was published but now you can also see some metrics you can see how many times it was cited you can see the field rated citation impacts are relative to all other Publications that have been cited.
This is almost exact 900 times more citations that this journal article got than the other because 1.0 is the global average number of citations. Um so you can also see more information here under view or Matrix and these are some of the new features that I want to show so under more metrics it doesn't only include the citations that are already in scope as it also includes metrics about social media. So how many times was this you know mentioned in a blog and how many policy citations how many policy documents actually use this this uh this article how many times was it tweeted. This article was tweeted or was it featured in tweets 380. Times that's significant so if you click on this because we get this data from a third-party data provider which is called plumx. So they give us this and we integrate it into scope like this so if you click on. Plum X here um you can. You can actually see the content of for example um the tweets about this here you can see for instance so this publication. It was used in a a policy document so the policy uh documents you can open the actual policy documents so.
I'll just open this one as an example so the policy document cited the article that we were looking at so this is of course something. That is very nice for a researcher to see when you do research and it is actually used by government to create policy or buy an international organization to create policy. That is a very useful way of showing. You know the impact of your of your research so many researchers are very eager to have their research reflected in such documents. Um so here you can see this was the NIH. They've got this public access policy and they refer to this article on on football injury in in the policy you can also when I go back to the The Details page I will be able to read that blog and you can also go to Twitter and you can actually see these 380 tweets that contained or that referred to this publication so when I mentioned in the beginning when we started I want to make you more aware of these features this is where you will find them and how you use them is just to um it gives an indication of how the article has influenced the broader than just Academia it also influenced policy it also influenced social media so that can be incorporated in your research as well uh so from the old detail page you can also find um other related Publications which you might not pick up with your keywords but we use other um you know artificial intelligence to really or algorithms more its algorithms to identify other Publications that are related to the one that you are looking for and that also you know helps you to make sure that you cover all the relevant literature in your field so you can look at these related documents related in terms of the authors that I've written them all related in terms of the keywords that they are using right of course I can't go through everything on this page I think the main thing that I wanted to highlight is you know the significance of the policy documents and also the social media I want to show another example uh which is becoming more increasingly important for researchers oh sorry my my throat and this is the last thing I want to show um is when we do a I just want to use a different example um so I can just clean clean that and I can say something like um now nutrition and um I'm going to use one of these operators which means it's a fixed phrase It's a specific phrase and say food security so if you are interested to find research that relate to the sustainable development goals so the sustainable development goals is basically a plan that the United Nations came up with which will help us find solutions for the big biggest all challenges that we have so there were 17 there are 17 challenges that have been identified on 17 goals and we can also find research that is related to these to these goals we use a specific methodology to identify Publications.
We use a keyword string but it's quite a complex string because each of these challenges are quite complex. But you use this keyword string and scopus can tell us which documents are related to sustainable development goals so this is an example when you find a publication you do a search for instance. Um they're just a normal search so this is on malnutrition we find a document here which is about food security if I click on this publication besides the metrics that it you know it gives me that I showed you that I showed you just now um it also gives us information about the sustainable development goals right so I'm just scrolling down so it says yes. This publication does in fact address one of the sustainable development goals or two of the of the goals. IT addresses goal number two which is zero hunger and it also addresses goal 13 which is climate action right um so the sustainable development goals the the um all the Publications in scopus are met to either indicate whether they address a sustainable development goal or not if it does not according to scopus um then it will just not show a sustainable development goal on the details page uh another option to find these is to is to do an advanced search.
I'll just show you quickly. This is not a focus just for interest sake if you do an advanced search and in the new layout of scopus you can just toggle to. Advanced query right here and actually this is now. Let's see if it will take me. Yes so there's my search store my search but if I scroll down here in the in the panel where the operators and the codes are we'll see you. In sustainable development goals click on that and then they are numbered one to 17. We've got 16 of them. In scopus you can click on one of the goals and it will show you what the search string looks like and you can manipulate this. You can amend this with say um you know these and but now you have to use the field codes affiliation say should country and we say Morocco and then we can do a search on all the Publications that are that address sdg1 that were written by Moroccan authors right. I'm not going to do the search because it's quite a big search. I'm going to stop here and go back to my home page and see if there are any questions um I'm not under the first one is um yes I can translate for you the question in French the first question articles or a research done on the Arabic language uh yes yes focus covers more than 42 languages um but uh the the the abstract the the abstract of the of the of the Articles have to be in English so if you have a journal which is in Arabic. Um and it doesn't have an abstract that is in English it can't be included into scopus but we do have Arabic um I wonder if I can show that let me just bring this um not sure if I mentioned that quickly um where you would find all the um just means it so basically what you would have to do is you will do a an advanced search then. They can just see if that's an option under advanced search. I haven't actually searched for Publications like this.
Editing advanced right now. I'll have to come back to you to show you where a list of all these uh you know where the where the languages are. Um but the short answer to your question is yes we do include Arabic but it has to the references and the abstracts have to be in English. The article can be in any language. There's there's no discrimination on that. Can we go to the next the next question. I'll just check hello. I would like to ask if you can explain house. Copies differs from academic search engine such as Google Scholar or Uber signs. Okay so it's actually a long question that's a whole seminar in itself but the very short answer to this is scopus is more um is more related to web of. Science in the sense that web of science also has a selection criteria for the journals that they Index right so scopus and web-off signs are very similar and they queue rate so they select they hand pick the journals that they cover they make sure that the journals are of uh you know good standing um and then they the rest I think is is is in the detail. I think it's in the detail there might be some journals in scopus that are not in web of Science and and the other way around so scopus. I think is differentiated mostly in terms of that it tries to cover more journals from their emerging. Nations and those include Latin America Africa and um and Asia so there was a dominance towards um you know Europe and North America and UK in terms of indexing research and scopus is trying to break away from that. We're still busy with that process. It's definitely not not perfect yet. Both of uh scopus and web of science are different from Google scholar in the sense that Google Scholar does not select the journals that they cover um so it basically scrapes uh the internet yeah just to harvest indiscriminately any publication. It can find that. Looks like an academic paper and it puts it together into Google Scholar so it's very useful because it's very comprehensive but the difference is in the in the quality you're not always sure of the quality because it might be something that's not peer-reviewed and it could also and the other differentiator is that you have.
The search functionality is limited so if you do this. I did this. I did this before we started if you look for the search query football and soccer injuries hamstring if you do this search in Google Scholar you find 21 000 Publications and there's very few ways that you can filter that you can only filter on date and you can filter on review article. So it's very you. It takes more time you will you have more articles but you have you have to spend more time to find the the most relevant literature for your studies right so that. I I think I'm going to to stop there. That is a short answer for what the differences are. Okay thank you. Russia I will answer the next two questions which are about access. I will answer in French so that that it will be easy for me and for the others to understand Electronics University foreign response no there is a um how I can set up alerts in Scottish to stay informed about new research in my field of Interest how this alerts work many questions. Lucia are about future sessions we we certainly will see that on the details in on the future session but if you want to take some to give some uh information shall I repeat the question for you. It's about the alerts. Yes yes um so yeah. I see there are many questions we won't be able to do all of them but I can take note of them and make sure that we address them in the in the upcoming sessions but just a short one on the alerts so there are two ways that you can set up alerts if you sign on you your profile is active and you go to uh alerts so in the alerts here you can set up different types of alerts so you can set up search alerts author citation alerts. So if you're the author you get a notification to say somebody cited you or you can set up a document citation alert right so this is when uh when the author when any of the documents are cited you get an alert with a document.
It's the specific document. Um that you will see an alert. The one that is most used is for search alerts so when you have these my search that. I did today football soccer hamstring injuries. And then um so I will set a new search alert which opens a box where I can you know. Put all the information. I can start my search and then I can save it and it will save my my search mail so in that box it will also ask me um you know. When do you want to uh when do you want to receive your alerts so here you see that for instance at your search alert based on your search on every week on a Thursday and I save that so they're two places in your profile under saved um under alerts or in your search when you've created your search just go to set search alert so this is on on your screen when you do your search right so maybe um maybe today I can just you know end off with I will. I will capture all of these questions um okay but unfortunately I see there are many questions. Thank you so much for all the interest in asking all these questions. I just maybe want to remind everyone of the upcoming sessions and I know you will also you know promote these um and make sure that everyone knows about them. I apologize that we were kept at 500 I. I'm always surprised by the wonderful interest of the Moroccan audience which goes over 500 doesn't happen anywhere else in the world so I'll make sure that it will be open next time for more for more participants but already next week. We have a session on literature review. Thank you thank you very much approaching. Thank you everyone bye-bye thank you.
I'm going to do fundamentals of scopus um just as a recap many of you already know scope as well. This is a refresher. I'm going to focus on one use case. I'm going to do a document search or a literature search but I'll try to touch on all the most important functionalities in scopus and then as we go along I will also highlight some of the new features so these are not always very new features but there are less used or less familiar features so I want to make sure everybody knows about them and also understands you know what they mean and and how you can use them. So these new features include pre-prints policy references indications where Publications link to sustainable development goals and also searching by Open Access state. This is right so before we get to that. I'm just going to do very quickly a few slides before we go online just to recap on. What is a scopus. I'm going to switch off my camera now to have more bandwidth right. So just you know what is scope is it is a global multi-disciplinary database for discovering academic literature and it also. It's also a visualization tool which you can analyze your search results and find metrics about publication so that you can also measure research performance right um so going. I'm mentioning that this is a subscription based um database but it is Source neutral Source neutral means. Uh that scopus covers a large number of of publishers. I will show you that might just see. My mouse is stuck right so you can see here that we are covering more than 7 000 publishers and that includes then serial titles as well as books so a larger number of Serial titles the active the number of active serial titles Journal titles is now more than 27 000. um we have more than 250 000 books in scopus and all of these. Publications are also linked to a an author and it's linked to an affiliation right so the these that it Aggregates it pulls together all the publications of an institution as well as of an uh author profile of authors and it uses an algorithm to do that so it does that automatically will in one of the subsequent webinars we will talk about author profiles specifically and how to correct an author profile and so.
I'm not going to focus on that today. I'm going to focus more on these 90 million items that we have in scopus these are the public applications and that is what I'll focus on today. On the right hand side you can see all the different use cases of cyborg so you can use cyborg. Scope is to uh to find journals to analyze journals. You can look at a researcher's impact you can decide or find other. Researchers or authors to collaborate with the focus today is going to be on finding the current research so what has been published in a specific research area that is our. Focus today so just more about um scopus. I'm not going to talk about all these numbers it's important to know that scopus covers journals and the articles in the journals and conferences books and patents patents it covers where a publication is linked to a patent. It's not a patent database in itself but you can find patent information as well right so these are the different document types that are available in scopus and then on the left hand side. You can see a covers. It's multidisciplinary so it covers all the broad subject areas physical sciences. Health Sciences social sciences and Life Sciences right so multidisciplinary covering different um types of Publications and for the rest. I'll I'll go online into a scopus itself and then we'll start with the fundamentals right so I'm just going to share my um it's a shame like browser before I go is the uh. Is there a question that I should attend to now at the stage. That doesn't look like it okay so. I'll continue because we don't have a lot of time right. So this is the the scopus um home page you get access to your scopus home page via your University was also available um via email. Which is you know which is bringing scopus to you.
Basically um what. I want to say in terms of using scopus before we get started. I'm going to use an example an example I. I hope you will like because it will bring back good memories for you but in terms of using scopus optimally it is important to sign on so. I'm already signed on you can see my profile is active LS if I click on here. There's a sign out. Um if if you are not signed in it will not it will show sign on it. Will they will show an option to sign on. Disable scope is sorry. So if you sign on you will have access to more functionality in the sign on mode which is basically when you're using it as a registered user you can save your results you can save your searches you can set up alerts and you can set up your preferences for exporting as well right so if you are not signed on these functionalities are not available to you and you know as you can think these are very useful so that you don't have to recreate your search strategy every time you want to do a search so I'm going to use cyborg with an example to show you the fundamentals of finding you know publication in the research area as you can see from the home page the screen it's optimized for searching you can it says start exploring and you can start exploring either documents authors or affiliations right so I'm going to start with with documents the authors and affiliations is a um a grouping of the Publications but by author or by Institution and it you when you do a author search you go directly to the author profile that you're looking for or to the affiliation profile so we're not going to cover that today we'll cover that in other webinars we're going to focus on documents documents means academic papers it can be Journal articles it can be book chapters conference proceedings because there are so many types of academic Publications we just call them documents and when you do your search you can search in in many fields so every research article is indexed into different fields and you can search in those specific fields so if I if I click on the Arrow you can see all the different fields so if you want to search in the if you're quite confident that your keyword is must be in the in the title of the Articles you can use it article title as the field that you want to search to your search in if you want to have a broader search you keep with article title abstract and keywords that is also the default so my search query that I'm going to have is about um football because I think Morocco is now very famous for football um and so football soccer is my example and I'm going to combine that with other Search terms for instance I also in specifically I want to look at injury so basically when you do your search um terms or you start your terms you divide yours your search into different concepts so the first concept is football the second concept that we're looking for is injuries around football so I'll use the asterisk and asterisk is one of the operators that help you to be more accurate in your search and if you want to find more of these operators you go to search tips and you will learn more about these operators which are very useful.
I'm going to add another um a keyword or concept here I'll do say hamstring for example just to make my search a little bit more narrow. I can't just do football and then we'll have thousands of Publications right so we've got three concepts. We've got football we've got injury and we've got the specific part of the body hamstring and uh with that. I'll just activate the search and wait for the results so you will see that. I'm using the new layout of the scopus interface right in the previous layout you only you saw only the um the results you didn't see the actual search page as well as the results. It's just a a slight difference. Everything that was on the old layout is still on the new layout it's just a little bit differently organized um but. I'm just mentioning in case this looks a little bit different to you.
This is the new layout so. I'm just going to scroll down because now I can see my results on the same page. It's already starting on the same page and the first thing that you can see is that we've got 1066 documents. Publications that were found and here on the left hand side. We've got this filter panel. The filter panel helps you to refine your search query according to more specific variables or more specific um you know aspects of of the search that you would want to focus on and one of these is that is that you can filter by. Open Access right so open access. All of these different categories do not in they do not affect you as a searcher open is open you know. Open Access means that it is full text but some research managers um or you know in the institutional planning for a university are actually interested in the different types of open access. It doesn't influence the the author you know when you find an open access publication with its green gold or bronze. It doesn't affect you know how open it is. It is just it is it will be available full text but what the significance is of this is that uh scopus is a bibliographic database so the default is that it does not include uh full text but if the author published whether whether with the option of Open Access which actually means that the author pays a fee up front an article processing fee up front to to make sure that this article is available um you know full text for everybody then it will become then only. Is it available in full text in scopus right so you can see of the 1066. Publications we found they are 458 which are open access and what these other functionality these are the you know categories mean in the green means that when the author published uh the the accepted manuscript version of the of the of the publication uh was added to an Institutional Repository so many universities have repositories they keep track of their researchers Publications they you cannot put a a published version unless it's open access in your repository but you can put your article or your accepted.
Awesome version you can add to the institutional repository and all Publications that are in institutional repositories are called Green open access. If it's cold. It means that the article was published in a journal where the whole Journal is is open access right so if you have a say you know you have a pub you have a journal title like um nature cancer and the and they only publish Open Access that means that to the journal is open access and the article is also gold open access and then bronze is where the publisher made a decision where they use the discretion to make an article Open Access so it could be because it's in the interest of Public Health or to accommodate an author or they have many reasons why they would decide we are going to at no cost to make this article Open Access or freely you know full text for everyone to see hybrid gold means that you publish in a journal. That is a subscription-based journal but you pay an additional fee asking that your specific article is made. Open Access so it could be in a journal where the other Publications are not Open Access. They're not full text but your article in that journal is full text so these are the different categories of of Open Access and we make this available mostly for administrative you know users where Administration wants to keep track of what types of um Open Access is used but for the user for the researcher for the author looking for literature. These categories are no different to each other. They just mean that it's full text available so that's the the one um you know that. I wanted to mention about one of the less used features. I would say um but that can be very useful because if you want to focus your search the search that we're doing now on football if you only want to see those results that have uh um you know full text attached to it then you can select open all open access and you can limit to that and it will limit you will only see open access so the further implication of Open Access is then if you find an article like this one was published this year.
And you you click this article. There is a pop-up that will lead you to the full text right so here you can see view. PDF but there will also be a on the right hand side a flag a red flag that will tell you this is a full text or PDF that you can download. I think my sister. My internet is a bit slow. Maybe that's why it's not showing or I can just try another one so there are different ways that you can find the full text. Let me just see if this one is so here already. You can see it's open access. I'm selecting this one if I don't have to I can just click on the title so this is the the little red arrow or the red pop-up that shows you where you can look at the PDF. That's the one way to find it. The other way is there's usually an option view. PDF so that is all about full text but getting back to our results so here we have our 1666 documents and there are various ways of course that we can filter now we can refine this search by uh you know selecting a shorter time range so we can see say we don't want all. Publications we want only the Publications from 2014 onwards and we just type in the dates and uh you have to always remember to scroll down sorry right to the bottom so that you can. Oh sorry now. They've moved this to the topic since so you can just um oh you select once you've selected it it automatically will then filter by that by what you've typed in. There are other filter options as well so by author by subject area. So if you're interested to only see those. Publications that the journal is classified as a medical journal or for Health Professions. Then you can look at those only if you know you only want to look at review articles the 94 review articles. Then you select review and you can limit that that was what I was looking for you have to select and then limit so I'm not I just want to show you also the journal title.
You can also focus a filter by a specific further keyword. So if you don't if you're not interested in publications related to female football players but only male you can select mail as one of the keywords to add to your search strategy affiliations you know the institutions where they're coming from and also you have a view on the on the funding sponsors. So after you've done your filtering the next you know function that is very useful in scopus is to analyze your results so analyze your results basically gives you a summary of that research field so here you can see the first publication about football. Injuries went back to 1969 and then from about 2010 it started increasing and there's been quite a focus on injuries in football so publication. This is definitely a topic that is or a research field that is increasing in. Its um it's more it's becoming more popular um so of and when you hover over one of these you can you know you can select it and then you can open up all the Publications that were published in 2012 or 2016. So you can it helps you to read chronologically um and also to see the trend of publication over time. If you scroll down you there's another window that shows you which are the journals so that are focusing most on these on on this topic and you can see it's the British Journal of Sports Medicine of the 1066 81 articles were published in this one. Journal right so British Journal of sports medicine is an important journal in this field. It's important in the sense that the most the volume of Publications are here but this does not give us an indication of how prestigious or how good the journal is it just tells us in a lot of Publications about football is in this journal if you want to know more about the quality of the journal itself then you click on this chart ready let me just click on the chart you know I clicked on the wrong place.
Let me just go back you know. Just give me a minute. I the internet is a bit slow it seems I'll just do the analyze results again and show you if I scroll down we were looking at the the sources the titles of the journals in this field and when you click on compare sources and view site score this is an indication of how important the journal is in terms of the site the sightedness of the journal so if you look at this well. British general of sports medicine is not only the journal where the most or the highest number of publication. It's also the highest ranking journal in this field it has a site score of nine of now it is 21.3. Which means on average articles in this journal get cited 21.3 times. It's an indication that it's a good journal in the sense that it is very highly cited. It has a high average number of citations per article. So you can feel confident when you're citing papers from this journal it should um it should be good articles you know in. Broad Strokes basically then you can also see the top authors so it orders for you are the top authors in this field. And then you can for instance you can go to a specific author and find more information so the top author in this field is a bar. Click on the and then it takes you to the author profile of the most prolific author in this field where you can see you know where what are the topics that the author is focusing on the number of Publications the age index the number of citations that this researcher has received so far so you get a full overview of the actual researcher that is considered as you know having published the most in this field. Oh gosh you know. I'm there's something in my screen that I can't there. You go back to my results again. Just want to close these additional windows and go back there we are was. And then scroll down and you can see other windows as well which gives you this trend overview of the field where you can see right so the UK US Australia um of you know they are the Nations that leading in this field but there are also other countries that have published in the field of um you know football so you just scroll down and you can then also select by the country so I was hoping to see you on the Rocco published two of these Publications right.
Um and scrolling down you can also see the types of documents here so most of these. Publications are articles and then there are also a few review articles and that's very useful because if you click on the review articles you can start your reading process by you. Know reading the review articles. Just make sure that you make your your search strategy a little bit more condensed not so many. Publications and then the subject area you can see is mostly in medicine and the funders here you can see. Also what is the which a funding organization is funding Research. In This research field right so analyze your search results. I I think it's a very useful um tool that we're having in scopus because it gives you that overview of your of your research field it shows you the trends and the most important researchers and countries in this specific research field. And then if you if we go further then you can also uh you can now export this this list. I would say the first thing to do always is to save your search because you can be interrupted and you might have spent a lot of time on your you know which words which keywords to use and you don't want to do that again so save your search first um so that you don't have to repeat that. I've already saved my search and then if you are happy with you know your results more or less at this stage then you can also set a search alert so that when new documents are added for this search string you get an email you'll get you can choose okay it once a month once a week every what day of the week and you can set your alert to be updated about new Publications and what else can you do with this. Uh with these search results is you. Can you know you can.
It's of course you have to read the abstract so read the abstracts activate the abstract. So that you can see whether it's useful for you um and then also you can sort them. Um so you've got we've got them by date now so the most recent but you can also look at um the most highly cited you know so make sure that you know which ones of these have been cited the most um because obviously that shows the importance of the of the article. Um and then you can select. If you've read the abstract you can select your your Publications and then you can export them. There are different exports that you can choose from so there's CSV respects Etc so CSV would you you can transform into Excel mendeley. If you're using mendeley as a reference manager endnote um zotero uses risk um so you can export into these different reference managers if you select a download so the difference between exporting is it if if I select for instance I'll show you if you select CSV and then you export the reference only and you can decide what components of the reference you want so you want the author the title The Year the source title all of these. If you're not using a reference manager you must think about these and then you can export them and you can export up to 20 000 of these public you know. English in this manner if you select download download means that you are going to download the free. The the uh full text so download is full text export other. You know citation information. It's the it's it's the reference information that you will be downloading or exporting. Sorry export right so that's that's the different downloads are limited to 50 downloads. At a time right so. I've only got three here if I select download. It will download in the full text of these three articles if the full text is available. If it's not available it will say. I cannot download because it's not full text right so these are important you know utility functions of of of scopus where you can download you can export another important thing to do is to um is to save your list so as you saved your search you can also save these results that you got if you can't read through them now you just save the list and then you can go back to that list by using your profile go to your profile and you'll see oh yeah all my saved lists or all my saved searches and you can organize your alerts here as well so this sign on information is is very useful so now looking at the detail of these references that we have received you know these documents that we identified so if you click on the the title it will take you through to the the page The Details page of this publication and you will find more information here so you can see the error once again where it was published but now you can also see some metrics you can see how many times it was cited you can see the field rated citation impacts are relative to all other Publications that have been cited.
This is almost exact 900 times more citations that this journal article got than the other because 1.0 is the global average number of citations. Um so you can also see more information here under view or Matrix and these are some of the new features that I want to show so under more metrics it doesn't only include the citations that are already in scope as it also includes metrics about social media. So how many times was this you know mentioned in a blog and how many policy citations how many policy documents actually use this this uh this article how many times was it tweeted. This article was tweeted or was it featured in tweets 380. Times that's significant so if you click on this because we get this data from a third-party data provider which is called plumx. So they give us this and we integrate it into scope like this so if you click on. Plum X here um you can. You can actually see the content of for example um the tweets about this here you can see for instance so this publication. It was used in a a policy document so the policy uh documents you can open the actual policy documents so.
I'll just open this one as an example so the policy document cited the article that we were looking at so this is of course something. That is very nice for a researcher to see when you do research and it is actually used by government to create policy or buy an international organization to create policy. That is a very useful way of showing. You know the impact of your of your research so many researchers are very eager to have their research reflected in such documents. Um so here you can see this was the NIH. They've got this public access policy and they refer to this article on on football injury in in the policy you can also when I go back to the The Details page I will be able to read that blog and you can also go to Twitter and you can actually see these 380 tweets that contained or that referred to this publication so when I mentioned in the beginning when we started I want to make you more aware of these features this is where you will find them and how you use them is just to um it gives an indication of how the article has influenced the broader than just Academia it also influenced policy it also influenced social media so that can be incorporated in your research as well uh so from the old detail page you can also find um other related Publications which you might not pick up with your keywords but we use other um you know artificial intelligence to really or algorithms more its algorithms to identify other Publications that are related to the one that you are looking for and that also you know helps you to make sure that you cover all the relevant literature in your field so you can look at these related documents related in terms of the authors that I've written them all related in terms of the keywords that they are using right of course I can't go through everything on this page I think the main thing that I wanted to highlight is you know the significance of the policy documents and also the social media I want to show another example uh which is becoming more increasingly important for researchers oh sorry my my throat and this is the last thing I want to show um is when we do a I just want to use a different example um so I can just clean clean that and I can say something like um now nutrition and um I'm going to use one of these operators which means it's a fixed phrase It's a specific phrase and say food security so if you are interested to find research that relate to the sustainable development goals so the sustainable development goals is basically a plan that the United Nations came up with which will help us find solutions for the big biggest all challenges that we have so there were 17 there are 17 challenges that have been identified on 17 goals and we can also find research that is related to these to these goals we use a specific methodology to identify Publications.
We use a keyword string but it's quite a complex string because each of these challenges are quite complex. But you use this keyword string and scopus can tell us which documents are related to sustainable development goals so this is an example when you find a publication you do a search for instance. Um they're just a normal search so this is on malnutrition we find a document here which is about food security if I click on this publication besides the metrics that it you know it gives me that I showed you that I showed you just now um it also gives us information about the sustainable development goals right so I'm just scrolling down so it says yes. This publication does in fact address one of the sustainable development goals or two of the of the goals. IT addresses goal number two which is zero hunger and it also addresses goal 13 which is climate action right um so the sustainable development goals the the um all the Publications in scopus are met to either indicate whether they address a sustainable development goal or not if it does not according to scopus um then it will just not show a sustainable development goal on the details page uh another option to find these is to is to do an advanced search.
I'll just show you quickly. This is not a focus just for interest sake if you do an advanced search and in the new layout of scopus you can just toggle to. Advanced query right here and actually this is now. Let's see if it will take me. Yes so there's my search store my search but if I scroll down here in the in the panel where the operators and the codes are we'll see you. In sustainable development goals click on that and then they are numbered one to 17. We've got 16 of them. In scopus you can click on one of the goals and it will show you what the search string looks like and you can manipulate this. You can amend this with say um you know these and but now you have to use the field codes affiliation say should country and we say Morocco and then we can do a search on all the Publications that are that address sdg1 that were written by Moroccan authors right. I'm not going to do the search because it's quite a big search. I'm going to stop here and go back to my home page and see if there are any questions um I'm not under the first one is um yes I can translate for you the question in French the first question articles or a research done on the Arabic language uh yes yes focus covers more than 42 languages um but uh the the the abstract the the abstract of the of the of the Articles have to be in English so if you have a journal which is in Arabic. Um and it doesn't have an abstract that is in English it can't be included into scopus but we do have Arabic um I wonder if I can show that let me just bring this um not sure if I mentioned that quickly um where you would find all the um just means it so basically what you would have to do is you will do a an advanced search then. They can just see if that's an option under advanced search. I haven't actually searched for Publications like this.
Editing advanced right now. I'll have to come back to you to show you where a list of all these uh you know where the where the languages are. Um but the short answer to your question is yes we do include Arabic but it has to the references and the abstracts have to be in English. The article can be in any language. There's there's no discrimination on that. Can we go to the next the next question. I'll just check hello. I would like to ask if you can explain house. Copies differs from academic search engine such as Google Scholar or Uber signs. Okay so it's actually a long question that's a whole seminar in itself but the very short answer to this is scopus is more um is more related to web of. Science in the sense that web of science also has a selection criteria for the journals that they Index right so scopus and web-off signs are very similar and they queue rate so they select they hand pick the journals that they cover they make sure that the journals are of uh you know good standing um and then they the rest I think is is is in the detail. I think it's in the detail there might be some journals in scopus that are not in web of Science and and the other way around so scopus. I think is differentiated mostly in terms of that it tries to cover more journals from their emerging. Nations and those include Latin America Africa and um and Asia so there was a dominance towards um you know Europe and North America and UK in terms of indexing research and scopus is trying to break away from that. We're still busy with that process. It's definitely not not perfect yet. Both of uh scopus and web of science are different from Google scholar in the sense that Google Scholar does not select the journals that they cover um so it basically scrapes uh the internet yeah just to harvest indiscriminately any publication. It can find that. Looks like an academic paper and it puts it together into Google Scholar so it's very useful because it's very comprehensive but the difference is in the in the quality you're not always sure of the quality because it might be something that's not peer-reviewed and it could also and the other differentiator is that you have.
The search functionality is limited so if you do this. I did this. I did this before we started if you look for the search query football and soccer injuries hamstring if you do this search in Google Scholar you find 21 000 Publications and there's very few ways that you can filter that you can only filter on date and you can filter on review article. So it's very you. It takes more time you will you have more articles but you have you have to spend more time to find the the most relevant literature for your studies right so that. I I think I'm going to to stop there. That is a short answer for what the differences are. Okay thank you. Russia I will answer the next two questions which are about access. I will answer in French so that that it will be easy for me and for the others to understand Electronics University foreign response no there is a um how I can set up alerts in Scottish to stay informed about new research in my field of Interest how this alerts work many questions. Lucia are about future sessions we we certainly will see that on the details in on the future session but if you want to take some to give some uh information shall I repeat the question for you. It's about the alerts. Yes yes um so yeah. I see there are many questions we won't be able to do all of them but I can take note of them and make sure that we address them in the in the upcoming sessions but just a short one on the alerts so there are two ways that you can set up alerts if you sign on you your profile is active and you go to uh alerts so in the alerts here you can set up different types of alerts so you can set up search alerts author citation alerts. So if you're the author you get a notification to say somebody cited you or you can set up a document citation alert right so this is when uh when the author when any of the documents are cited you get an alert with a document.
It's the specific document. Um that you will see an alert. The one that is most used is for search alerts so when you have these my search that. I did today football soccer hamstring injuries. And then um so I will set a new search alert which opens a box where I can you know. Put all the information. I can start my search and then I can save it and it will save my my search mail so in that box it will also ask me um you know. When do you want to uh when do you want to receive your alerts so here you see that for instance at your search alert based on your search on every week on a Thursday and I save that so they're two places in your profile under saved um under alerts or in your search when you've created your search just go to set search alert so this is on on your screen when you do your search right so maybe um maybe today I can just you know end off with I will. I will capture all of these questions um okay but unfortunately I see there are many questions. Thank you so much for all the interest in asking all these questions. I just maybe want to remind everyone of the upcoming sessions and I know you will also you know promote these um and make sure that everyone knows about them. I apologize that we were kept at 500 I. I'm always surprised by the wonderful interest of the Moroccan audience which goes over 500 doesn't happen anywhere else in the world so I'll make sure that it will be open next time for more for more participants but already next week. We have a session on literature review. Thank you thank you very much approaching. Thank you everyone bye-bye thank you.