Like most databases scopus offers a fairly straightforward search on its opening page. We'll put in a simple search as an example. Let's imagine i'm looking for papers about cognitive therapy. And its treatment of anxiety. I'll put into the first box cognitive behavioral therapy or cbt and then into my second box anxiety all of the operators. I use here are fairly standard but will flash up a summary of the key operators. You're likely to want to use on scopus. You'll find that there are a large number of fields that you can select and in this case. I think i'm going to look quite specifically so i'll say article title for both fields. This means that each paper that comes up must have either cognitive behavioral therapy or cbt in its title and anxiety and we can see that that's 1682 papers down the left hand side of the page. I have options for limiting the results. And let's say that i would like the most up-to-date research so wish to only see results from 2020 to 2022. To do this i select all three years and then i scroll to the top of the limiter column and i select the limit to you. Have the option also to exclude. So if i hadn't wanted to see results from those years i'd have clicked the exclude button as it is. I can see that 396 documents were published that meet my criteria between 2020 and 2022. Now there are a range of limiters you can use down the left hand side but i wanted also to flag for you. The analyze search results function. This is something you don't see in a lot of databases and is incredibly helpful in my opinion clicking on this will show you an overview of the documents that you have in your list so in our case the 396 results we've just seen it then presents the data about these papers in various different ways so we can see which years had the most publications which countries our results are coming from and let's say in terms of countries we wanted to just see papers that are based in the uk or connected to the uk in some way so it may be that one of the authors was british even if the research took place elsewhere geography is after all quite a tricky thing to define when it comes to database searching and in fact we can then click on analyze search results again for just the 58 results and there.

You'll see that the documents are not only tagged with uk. We've got other other geographies included there but let's say we can look at the funding sponsor and this is really useful for when you're researching a topic area when you know you want to publish a paper or you know you want to start with some research. You can look at who's funding research in this area. You can look at which journal articles are most commonly publishing in this area. You can explore a whole lot via scopus but let's go back to searching we've set up a multi-field search here but let's say we wanted to put each term in individually and then combine together one of the main reasons that you may wish to do this on other databases is that it will allow you to roll in index terms for example mesh terms on scopus. You don't have that option. You are only able to use free text terms however line by line. Searching can still be really helpful in identifying which terms are working well and which are perhaps not working so well so to run line by line searching we will simply put one term at a time into our search boxes run each in turn and then we will combine them together after that once. All three of my terms have been put in. I'll now need to combine them on most databases the way to do. This is to navigate to your search history. And there you'll find an option for combining terms. However if you scroll to the search history on the main searching page of scopus you'll not find an obvious way of combining and so you'll need to go to the advanced document search from this page if you scroll down to your search history you'll have slightly more options and you'll see in the top right hand corner of your search history a combine queries field into this.

We'll put the line references combined with ors and ands that relate to our search in scopus. It's important that you put a hash before each line number so that it's clear this refers to a line rather than to something you wish to search and we'll see that we're back to the 1006 results so this search should not generate any more or fewer results than putting all the terms in together as you build up the search one step at a time exactly what's going on with all elements of your search we'll limit it back to the 2020 to 2022 date range and the same 396 documents. We had there a few minutes. Ago are now on our screen again.