[webinar] Smart ways to quickly find the best academic literature
Thank you i'm just waiting for my screen to appear. Thank you for joining um thank you for joining welcome to our webinar today. On smart ways to quickly find the best academic literature as mentioned um i am the consultant for for elsa fear in the race in the in the area of research management and i will focus this presentation on scopus elseview's abstract and citation index of academic literature. So the aim of this webinar is to present a quick start to using scopus efficiently to find academic literature so it is by no means a comprehensive overview of all the functionality scopus is also a research management tool and contains extensive research metrics. So if you would like more information on any of the other aspects of scopus you can visit the scopus corporate website at www.elsifier.com solutions.scopus. Or you can contact me directly directly we will also be doing some more webinars where you can tune in and learn more about the features that scopus offers you so what we will follow is that i will go through five ways in which you can improve the way you look for academic information and when using scopus so what i will talk about is uh is about choosing the database um so in terms of that considering the scope and the quality of the database to search also learning a few trip tips and tricks to help you find information quicker and that is more relevant for your topic then also looking at analyzing your search results to ensure that you understand that to understand the publication trend and to identify the top journals the top authors and subject how the subject distribution works within your your your topic that you are working with another smart way in terms of finding related material and then also focusing on the most cited and the most shared material to ensure that your work reflects the best research available on the topic there are many more ways of course but for the sake of time these are the ways these are the strategies that we will be looking at in this presentation so to ensure you find the best information um and to ensure that you don't miss important research on a specific topic you must search in the right place and you want to so you want to search in a place uh which is within a database that is comprehensive that is multi-disciplinary that has diverse publication types books articles conference proceedings you want your database to reflect a relevancy so not be focused within a certain subject area for example necessarily also you want to find scholarly material so a material that is peer-reviewed and you want to be able to find the full text as well and you want proof you want powerful search options but the database must still be easy to use so we will be looking at these ways so you want to search in a database which is comprehensive in this um area scopus offers content from more than 5 000 publishers it covers 62 million records from about 22 000 journal titles the database is updated on a is is updated daily and it records back um it has the records back to 1823.
it also includes articles in press from about four thousand almost four thousand journal titles and has open access journals also to the amount of about three it's now almost four thousand active gold open access journals are indexed within scopus in terms of being multidisciplinary in this respect scopus covers all the science areas so you have information on life sciences social sciences physical sciences and health sciences um and then beneath those you have 27 subject categories and then a further 30 334 sub-subject areas um so a very comprehensive overview of the whole area of science um in terms of diverse publications um being able to look at journals and and books which is open all of those screens scopus offers you access to 20 almost 22 000 peer reviewed journals um then also 361 trade journals and it includes the funding data from from from acknowledgements as well and citations included in the journals are date backed into 1970.
We are busy with the process where we are expanding our citation information and this is almost completed and by the end of this year all the citations will be will will go back to 1917. Conferences we include uh 90 000 conferences. Um in scopus or indexed in scopus and these are mainly for engineering and for the computer sciences. Um 100 531 book series are included and also 120 000 standalone books then about 27 million patents that come from the five major patent offices worldwide so to ensure that you have a worldwide wide view on your topic and that it is not only focused on publication from the uk and the usa for example the database must include must include publications from emerging research nations as well so in this respect scopus includes publications from 40 languages um and from about 105 different countries to further ensure that your results that you get are relevant. The abstract that scopus provides is also very useful because then it allows you to evaluate if a publication is suitable for your topic or not also citations are very important because citations allows you to find information that is based on the fact that publications cite each other so that is an indication of the importance of a specific publication so and also the way that site the the way that the index is built up also allows you to find information. Say if you are looking for information on cardiac arrest for example you will also find other publications that refer to heart attack even though those especially that specific phrase is not included with within your search but because the citation database is built in such a way that it links all these cited um cited publications to each other it actually empowers your search to find documents that are not only within the phrases that you are searching for also of course citations are regarded as a measure of importance or in measure of value of the contribution to a specific scientific field. It really leads you to the most important.
Excuse me most important publications within a research area um so those all work together to make sure that the relevancy of the results that you find when you are searching for academic information really is improved so in science the way that we know that a publication is accurate and that it is based on research principles um is that other researchers and scientists have agreed that it is the scopus ensures that it only provides high standard scholarly publications by having a board that approves the journals that are indexed within scopus and to do this. The board uses a selection of criteria which is published on the scopus website and these criteria include that it must be peer-reviewed the journal must be peer-reviewed it must include abstracts it must have regular publication the articles or the documents indexed must be it must have references and these references are usually in english and the journal must be online as well scopus is also endorsed by the major world university ranking organization such as q s times i high education shanghai and u.s news which really makes sure that the publications that you will find in scopus are scholarly and that they are truly reputable ultimately it is important of course to get access to the full text of the publication so scopus provides a link once you have found your your your your reference to your article that you're interested in it will provide a link to the full text. If the library subscribes to the journal you will be able to to to open the full text and if uh the library does not subscribe. Um researchers can usually purchase the article or request it from the library through the inter library loan system. So making sure that you have access to the full text is also very important in your choice of the database that you will be using finally of course the database must be powerful and it must be easy to use um so to give your your search some power. Scopus provides a number of options for you to filter but the search box remains clear and easy to understand so the interface that you're working with is still easy to use um advanced.
Search options are also available. Um sorry let me just go back my slide so advanced search options are also available if you require to do a very complicated search right so the next smart thing to do is to learn a few tips and tricks once you've decided when once you've chosen your your database and you've chosen um scopus you know um that it really gives you that comprehensive overview of all the information that you're looking for it is relevant it is up to date um so the next smart thing that you can concentrate on is to learn a few tips and tricks which will allow you to search even more efficiency so we will look at a few of these operators and filters and refinements that we will that we have in scopus and after a few more slides that i will be going through we can. I will show you how these work online in scopus so in scopus you can use boolean operators boolean operators you can use proximity operators braces quotation marks asterisks and the question mark as well and which which will help you to narrow down your search quite sufficiently so proximity operators allow you to search for words near to each other for example if you're looking for articles where morphine and pain on or should not be more than 15 words apart. The operator you use for that is w slash 15 so 15 will refer to the number of words that uh the two that the phrases or the words in the phrases should be should be a part or you can look for articles where the word be where the word behavioral should precede the word disturbance for example. So you would use p or e slash 3 and that would then give you um x that would then return results where the words behavioral is three words apart from the word disturbance and actually pres and then actually precedes those okay so a very um powerful um way to make sure that you find the relevant or the most accurate phrase is by using the curly brace so in the example that i've got on my screen.
You can see oyster tote fish that if you use the curly brace it will though the phrase will be looked for in exactly in exactly that format so but if you can also use um the double quotation mark in the next example that i've shown like in heart attack the loose quotation that will give you a loose phrase result so you if you use heart attack for example um it will not it will return results by heart attack or next to each other but it could also be where heart and attack are within a few words of each other within the title for example or or anywhere in the in the abstract or the keywords so attack would be beforehand. It's a loose phrase. You can use the asterisk to replace any number of characters so if you use for example h e asterisk it will match any words starting with h e such just he or her or help or hello or helicopter. So if you're not exactly sure how the how the wording will be or how the wording will be used within that in that publication. The asterisk can help help you make sure that you find all the relevant preferences. The same is in terms of using the question mark because the question mark replaces uh one letter so if you use h e and a question mark uh. Your results will written matches for him and hen but only replacing one letter so these are just a few of the operators that you can use within scopus which will make it which will make your search results more more accurate so another way to to get better results when you're searching you should always limit or refine your search and in scopus you can do so easily by a number of ways that you can limit or filter and these includes by year so when you're looking for um for information on a specific topic to to limit to to receive only results within a certain time span um you can limit by by author name by subject area by document type by the source title with other words the journal in which you expect that um that publication to be by keywords by affiliation by country by source type and also by language so at the we will be looking at this in the live search that i will do in scopus in a moment so the third smart thing that you can do is to analyze your results and this gives you an idea of the publication trend of a topic.
So if you're busy with a masters or thesis um or phd thesis this will also help to ensure that you have a really good literature. Review so in scopus search results can be analyzed across seven seven elements you can analyze by year by source by author affiliation country or document type and the subject area and this feature is available throughout scopus. Whenever you have searched for information your search results will appear here and next to it you will have the option and it's marked in in yellow that you can analyze your search results. So i'll just go through a number of ways which scopus allows you to to analyze these results and the first analysis that you can do is to look at the date range of the publication and by looking at the dates you can see whether the topic is increasing or decreasing in interest and in productivity so in the result that i'm showing on the screen. There's a clear indication that since about 2005 2007 there's been an increasing interest in um or a trend upward trend in the publications in the specific research area so so this trend information is an indication whether the topic is increasing or decreasing and it is a useful tool to facilitate chronological reading of the literature or to focus on higher productivity periods so by clicking on the nodes um this is not live now but in scopus you can click on the notes and you can start your reading of a certain topic within a certain year or you can decide with that. You want to focus your reading on the on the year of publication where the most publications for that topic um has appeared so that is uh that is useful to see how um what what what the trend is and whether um some whether whether a topic has more more interest um as the time goes by that also gives you an indication of when you are when you have to decide on your um your on your phd topic or your master's topic.
It's important to know whether your your topic is increasing or with it is it decreasing in interest so this is one of the ways that you can do that okay so secondly it is important to determine which are the most relevant journals within your subject area that you are looking at and one of the principles that we have in information. Science is that within any subject area a small number of journals usually produce the majority of the essential literature for that topic and it is important to determine which the core journals are within that subject area so scopus allows you to look at the source title the source titles and it um lists the journal titles that include the most the most articles that are that are the same as the one of the topic that you are searching for so this is then a very important area of determining which other core journals that you should be looking at when you are reading for this for this topic that you are working on then also look at who are the top authors for any research that you are conducting. It's important to make sure that you include the research of the top authors for that fulfill that subject area so once again within information science lotka's law determines that in any given subject area there are a small number of highly productive scientists and a large number of scientists with lower productivity and it is important to find the core authors for a topic by looking at the volume of their publications in that specific field so scopus as in the example that i've included on the screen scopus then lists um the the authors that have been most productive within a um within the topic that you are researching so moving on also making sure that you find the right type of document.
Scopus provides an overview of the document types in a topic so for example in engineering topics you will have more conference proceedings for example. Um and in this in this analysis that scopus provides you will be guided to the review articles as well you will see on the screen for this specific topic. You have a larger number of articles um and then you have a number of conference proceedings and also a number of review articles so document type is useful for knowing what type of literature to focus on arts and humanities. Uh this this this pie chart will look completely different for example because you will have more books um so this also guides um the type of documents that you should be looking for when you are looking for information and then uh just to keep in mind that if you focus on your review article so if you start reading uh for a specific subject area art the review articles can be very useful because they will provide you with a summary of the literature that is available within that specific topic. Then finally scopus also shows you the breakdown of the sub-disciplines within the topic so even if you are an engineer you can you can see how your topic overlaps with other subject areas and that also allows you to narrow down your reading if you are looking at a subject from a specific perspective so even if it's um so for instance also engineering but you look you want to look and how it overlaps with environmental signs and that is how you want to focus your reading this. This analysis will allow you to do that so um by clicking on the information this is not live now we will look at it live in a minute. You will find all the articles all the publications that have a reference to to to environmental science for example. Okay so the fourth smart thing to do is to find related material and scopus uses a special algorithm to do that so that you make sure that you're not missing out on important literature so by we will look at this now in a minute but also finding related documents.
How this is done is by looking at other documents that have the same references or have the same authors and this is a very powerful way of leading you to other important documents within a specific subject area then finally of course it is important uh it is very useful if you can focus on the most scientific and the most shared shape publications um citation is is widely accepted as an indicator of a publication significance or its contribution to the development or the understanding of a topic and then similarly social media activity also provides valuable information about the novelty of the research result based on the fact that it is more immediate in social media. It's more immediate and it comes from a diverse audience so you will have practitioners educators and the general public when they mention or when they share information via social media it gives a very immediate indication of the importance of a certain publication. So in scopus we have um the option in the in the um in the image on the screen you will see that there's an option on the right hand side where once you have your document results or your set results. There's an option to use cited by and this is a sort option so that you can look at the articles or the publications that are most cited first so that you have a clear. Indication of these are regarded as the most valued publications by other researchers because they have cited um and you will find you can also further evaluate the importance or the significance of the publications. Then by looking at the article level metrics that are provided in scopus. So you will have. We have in scopus. You have scholarly activity so for example when a publication has been shared in mendeley. Uh whether it has been um mentioned within a blog or in wikipedia as a social commentary social scholarly commentary actually and then also mass media so if a article has been tweeted or mentioned in facebook these are also counted and it gives you an indication of which is the most most immediate value that is attached to a specific article.
Okay so this just brings me to the end of a of my slide where i wanted to give you an overview of five smart ways that you can that you can use um so this was just to recap on. Those is to make sure that you're using the right database and to make sure that your database that you are using like scopus provides you with the um the comprehensive information the relevant information the easy to use and then using tips and tricks analyzing your search results being able to find your related material and focusing on the most cited and the most shared so now we can go to scopus itself and i just want to show all of these. This is the theory now. Let's see in practice whether it in indeed helps you to find better results so i'm going to open my scopus myoscopus right okay. I'm going to do a an example of a search and try to use some of the features that i've just mentioned to you um so in the first place i'm going to use um i'm going to use my curly brackets so i'm going to use solar desalination this and i've used the curly brackets for that and i'm going to use on the right hand side. There's an option to search in article title so that we have a very. This is a very no uh focused narrow way of searching. We want to make sure that solar desalination that exact phrase will be present in the article title then we can add using the boolean operator and we can also look for water filtration. I'm actually going to use. I'm not sure i'm not sure how this phrase may be used in a public location. So i'm going to add the asterisk there waterfall trade or it can be water filtering and i'm going to say that this can be searched for in all fields so it might be in the abstract using the limit to the date range. We can limit to published between 2 000 and present right so we've got solar desalination in our curly brackets we've used a boolean operator and we are combining that with water filtration but we're not exactly sure how the word is used within the publication so we are using the um the wild card the asterisk to be able to have more flexibility for the phrase to be used.
I'm not going to do any further filtering and then we can search so you see we have 33 document results for this search and the and you will see underneath you have further refinement options so you can further refine and you can see you can design you. Want to look at only the publications of a specific year you already have a listing a small listing of the top authors within this the subject or this topic you can falter by just clicking in one of them and looking at those publications only and this is a breakdown of the subject area the document type the source titles the keywords affiliation the country the source type and the language so really a a big variety of ways that you can further refine and filter your search. I'm not going to use any of these further now. I want to show you how you can analyze the results. Now so you just click on analyze the search results as i showed in my slides. I'm just waiting for that to appear and here you can see the publication trend by year so really spiking there within from 2009 um and then also between 2011 and 2014. Uh the publications um this is a. This is a natural decline because all the publications from 2015 have not been indexed within scopus yet um but illustrating uh that it is possible to view your documents or to further analyze to see whether this document this topic is increasing in its interest or whether it is declining and you can see a very very clear increase in the interest with authors that are publishing in this area now to be sure that you uh read the right journals and make sure that you cover this comprehensively scopus provides you with the top journals in which these articles have been published and these are all live links you can actually click on them and you can read the publications by a journal by the journal title first all the articles within a specific journal title if that makes sense to you scopus further provides you then with the feature that you can compare the journals based on the metrics that are within scopus but we're not going to focus on that at the moment at this moment we want to look at making sure that you know which are the top journals in your research area another way of analyzing as i mentioned is then looking at the top authors and by clicking on the author you can see the publications and you can read the publications and author by author you can see also who are the most who are the most prominent um institutions that are publishing in the specific research area this is usually very interesting for master students and for phd students and also for postdocs to see where they can build where they can build their collaborations but an overview of which institutions are focusing within a specific research.
Area you can also see the countries and by clicking um on the left hand side of in the panel you can select only seeing the countries uh which are most interested in so in terms of egypt for example you can see eight documents were published in this on this topic and if you click on egypt you will you will see the actual publications and you can read them the document type. Um in this instance you will see that. There are many conference papers for example so 37 of this 73 results that we received are conference papers 60 are research articles and uh 2.7 or review articles so these review articles usually give a very a good summary of the publications within this. Um within this topic so these are usually very useful to look at and then a further analysis of the subject area so you will see that this this topic overlaps um with all links to engineering energy environmental materials science chemical engineering. So you can decide in terms of which emphasis you want to place whether it is on desalination from a material science perspective so that you can also focus your reading around a specific approach that you have for this for this topic right so that brings us to the end of the ways that you can analyze your search results and i want to show you further examples of how you can find related documents there.
So i'm going to repeat this. Um the system remembers my my last search i can just search again and get my 73 documents and now i want to see whether i can find any. I'm going to first search. Show you the cited by and then we can look at the related documents so as i showed in my presentation in the slides. Once you have your results you can click on a sort on option so we want to see our results by the number of times. A document has been cited. So that if we can look at the most important publications first so yoga will see the number of citations guiding you to showing you what the significance is of that specific article then and you can look at also you can also get an overview of who has cited those publications right so that is how you focus on the most cited. I'm going to select. I'm going to select say the second one so once you've clicked on a search result it is going to open you with the document details of this um of this publication so you see the um the the name of the journal you see the title you see the abstract and then on the right hand side it shows you the number of items that have been that uh that it has. That's cited this article and you can view all of them and look at those as well as i mentioned. Um also you can have a look at the metrics that are provided the social media metrics. So these show. This shows that this document besides the 58 citations that it is received it has a and it has a field weighted citation impact um that is more than the world average where one represents the world average or the scope is average. So this is 63 more cited than any other documents in the same subject area um within scopus and also gives you the idea.
Here comes the more social media matrix giving you an indication of the number of times this document was shared within rain delay for example so these are two ways that you can look at the significance or have an idea of the significance of of the publication that you are looking at that it has been cited and that it also has had impact within the social sphere where it has been shared with other researchers so i want to go back to my results and show you another example of this. Um let me just see energy efficiency. I'm going to show you one way. We have more social commentary for example no not that one just going back to the results let me just click through a few of them and see what kind of metrics we have. I'm just going to see one last time right. I've got i'm going to open view all metric. Uh to give you an indication of the kinds of metrics that you will be able to see. Yeah so we've talked about the citation overview. You can talk about if we've talked about mendeley sharing um and this is a mention a social commentary. It was mentioned in a blog for example so this specific publication was also mentioned within a blog and you can do all scholarly communication. It was also mentioned in so it was mentioned in wikipedia. So this all helps you uh to determine what the significance is of the article that you are working with and allowing you to focus on the most important first right so i'm going back to show you related documents so here we have. This is one of the examples of the of the results of the article results. And if you see on the right hand side in the right hand panel you have the option of related documents so as i mentioned in the presentation you can. The related documents are based on the references on on other documents that have uh that are that overlap in terms of the references of those articles but also of the authors. And you can find more you can these are the top three and then you can do all related documents based on references or you can find more related documents and scopus based on authors or keywords as well so let's just click on that authors for example so if you want to do further reading on authors that have some that have similar publications.
You can do that on top. You have a little menu where you can look at show references as well so these are the documents that share the same references as the documents that you received in your results. I'm just going back here looking and view all the documents that have that are similar. You can select the references for example so this is the references of the document that you are looking at and you can select whether which other of these documents you would like to further. Look at to see whether they also will be useful for your for your topic right so this was the example that i wanted to share with you. It was looking at solar desalination that we combined with water filtration um what we did is we we faulted and we refined we decided we only wanted to look at documents between 2000 and and and present we analyzed their results to determine which were the top journals which were the top authors whether in terms of date with this has increasing um importance within the research area whether it's a growing emphasis or not or whether it's declining then we looked at the most cited and we also looked at finding related documents. So i'm going to turn back to my presentation. I'm opening that so with this. I want to conclude um scopus is indeed a comprehensive and multidisciplinary index of high high quality scholarly material which covers a wide range of publication has powerful search capabilities and it is easy to use. I hope that was able to demonstrate that it empowers you to find relevant academic material quicker through allowing you to analyze your search results and to find related material and to focus on most cited and shared publications um and it has several features such as um but scopus also has several features such as alerts and downloading and creating bibliographies and looking at journal metrics and h indexes and much more so we were not able to cover all of this but we invite you to tune in for more webinars than on these topics that i've mentioned.
Now i also want to invite you to stay in touch and follow the health of your africa. Latest news you can follow us on facebook and on the scopus blog and with that thank you and i look forward to hearing whether there are any questions and for your feedback. Thank you very much. Thank you very much everyone so if you have any questions please just unmute yourself from uh on the left side of your name on the attendance list or you can ask your questions on the chat module so you'll find the chat module the last one on the screen so you can write your question so any questions.
it also includes articles in press from about four thousand almost four thousand journal titles and has open access journals also to the amount of about three it's now almost four thousand active gold open access journals are indexed within scopus in terms of being multidisciplinary in this respect scopus covers all the science areas so you have information on life sciences social sciences physical sciences and health sciences um and then beneath those you have 27 subject categories and then a further 30 334 sub-subject areas um so a very comprehensive overview of the whole area of science um in terms of diverse publications um being able to look at journals and and books which is open all of those screens scopus offers you access to 20 almost 22 000 peer reviewed journals um then also 361 trade journals and it includes the funding data from from from acknowledgements as well and citations included in the journals are date backed into 1970.
We are busy with the process where we are expanding our citation information and this is almost completed and by the end of this year all the citations will be will will go back to 1917. Conferences we include uh 90 000 conferences. Um in scopus or indexed in scopus and these are mainly for engineering and for the computer sciences. Um 100 531 book series are included and also 120 000 standalone books then about 27 million patents that come from the five major patent offices worldwide so to ensure that you have a worldwide wide view on your topic and that it is not only focused on publication from the uk and the usa for example the database must include must include publications from emerging research nations as well so in this respect scopus includes publications from 40 languages um and from about 105 different countries to further ensure that your results that you get are relevant. The abstract that scopus provides is also very useful because then it allows you to evaluate if a publication is suitable for your topic or not also citations are very important because citations allows you to find information that is based on the fact that publications cite each other so that is an indication of the importance of a specific publication so and also the way that site the the way that the index is built up also allows you to find information. Say if you are looking for information on cardiac arrest for example you will also find other publications that refer to heart attack even though those especially that specific phrase is not included with within your search but because the citation database is built in such a way that it links all these cited um cited publications to each other it actually empowers your search to find documents that are not only within the phrases that you are searching for also of course citations are regarded as a measure of importance or in measure of value of the contribution to a specific scientific field. It really leads you to the most important.
Excuse me most important publications within a research area um so those all work together to make sure that the relevancy of the results that you find when you are searching for academic information really is improved so in science the way that we know that a publication is accurate and that it is based on research principles um is that other researchers and scientists have agreed that it is the scopus ensures that it only provides high standard scholarly publications by having a board that approves the journals that are indexed within scopus and to do this. The board uses a selection of criteria which is published on the scopus website and these criteria include that it must be peer-reviewed the journal must be peer-reviewed it must include abstracts it must have regular publication the articles or the documents indexed must be it must have references and these references are usually in english and the journal must be online as well scopus is also endorsed by the major world university ranking organization such as q s times i high education shanghai and u.s news which really makes sure that the publications that you will find in scopus are scholarly and that they are truly reputable ultimately it is important of course to get access to the full text of the publication so scopus provides a link once you have found your your your your reference to your article that you're interested in it will provide a link to the full text. If the library subscribes to the journal you will be able to to to open the full text and if uh the library does not subscribe. Um researchers can usually purchase the article or request it from the library through the inter library loan system. So making sure that you have access to the full text is also very important in your choice of the database that you will be using finally of course the database must be powerful and it must be easy to use um so to give your your search some power. Scopus provides a number of options for you to filter but the search box remains clear and easy to understand so the interface that you're working with is still easy to use um advanced.
Search options are also available. Um sorry let me just go back my slide so advanced search options are also available if you require to do a very complicated search right so the next smart thing to do is to learn a few tips and tricks once you've decided when once you've chosen your your database and you've chosen um scopus you know um that it really gives you that comprehensive overview of all the information that you're looking for it is relevant it is up to date um so the next smart thing that you can concentrate on is to learn a few tips and tricks which will allow you to search even more efficiency so we will look at a few of these operators and filters and refinements that we will that we have in scopus and after a few more slides that i will be going through we can. I will show you how these work online in scopus so in scopus you can use boolean operators boolean operators you can use proximity operators braces quotation marks asterisks and the question mark as well and which which will help you to narrow down your search quite sufficiently so proximity operators allow you to search for words near to each other for example if you're looking for articles where morphine and pain on or should not be more than 15 words apart. The operator you use for that is w slash 15 so 15 will refer to the number of words that uh the two that the phrases or the words in the phrases should be should be a part or you can look for articles where the word be where the word behavioral should precede the word disturbance for example. So you would use p or e slash 3 and that would then give you um x that would then return results where the words behavioral is three words apart from the word disturbance and actually pres and then actually precedes those okay so a very um powerful um way to make sure that you find the relevant or the most accurate phrase is by using the curly brace so in the example that i've got on my screen.
You can see oyster tote fish that if you use the curly brace it will though the phrase will be looked for in exactly in exactly that format so but if you can also use um the double quotation mark in the next example that i've shown like in heart attack the loose quotation that will give you a loose phrase result so you if you use heart attack for example um it will not it will return results by heart attack or next to each other but it could also be where heart and attack are within a few words of each other within the title for example or or anywhere in the in the abstract or the keywords so attack would be beforehand. It's a loose phrase. You can use the asterisk to replace any number of characters so if you use for example h e asterisk it will match any words starting with h e such just he or her or help or hello or helicopter. So if you're not exactly sure how the how the wording will be or how the wording will be used within that in that publication. The asterisk can help help you make sure that you find all the relevant preferences. The same is in terms of using the question mark because the question mark replaces uh one letter so if you use h e and a question mark uh. Your results will written matches for him and hen but only replacing one letter so these are just a few of the operators that you can use within scopus which will make it which will make your search results more more accurate so another way to to get better results when you're searching you should always limit or refine your search and in scopus you can do so easily by a number of ways that you can limit or filter and these includes by year so when you're looking for um for information on a specific topic to to limit to to receive only results within a certain time span um you can limit by by author name by subject area by document type by the source title with other words the journal in which you expect that um that publication to be by keywords by affiliation by country by source type and also by language so at the we will be looking at this in the live search that i will do in scopus in a moment so the third smart thing that you can do is to analyze your results and this gives you an idea of the publication trend of a topic.
So if you're busy with a masters or thesis um or phd thesis this will also help to ensure that you have a really good literature. Review so in scopus search results can be analyzed across seven seven elements you can analyze by year by source by author affiliation country or document type and the subject area and this feature is available throughout scopus. Whenever you have searched for information your search results will appear here and next to it you will have the option and it's marked in in yellow that you can analyze your search results. So i'll just go through a number of ways which scopus allows you to to analyze these results and the first analysis that you can do is to look at the date range of the publication and by looking at the dates you can see whether the topic is increasing or decreasing in interest and in productivity so in the result that i'm showing on the screen. There's a clear indication that since about 2005 2007 there's been an increasing interest in um or a trend upward trend in the publications in the specific research area so so this trend information is an indication whether the topic is increasing or decreasing and it is a useful tool to facilitate chronological reading of the literature or to focus on higher productivity periods so by clicking on the nodes um this is not live now but in scopus you can click on the notes and you can start your reading of a certain topic within a certain year or you can decide with that. You want to focus your reading on the on the year of publication where the most publications for that topic um has appeared so that is uh that is useful to see how um what what what the trend is and whether um some whether whether a topic has more more interest um as the time goes by that also gives you an indication of when you are when you have to decide on your um your on your phd topic or your master's topic.
It's important to know whether your your topic is increasing or with it is it decreasing in interest so this is one of the ways that you can do that okay so secondly it is important to determine which are the most relevant journals within your subject area that you are looking at and one of the principles that we have in information. Science is that within any subject area a small number of journals usually produce the majority of the essential literature for that topic and it is important to determine which the core journals are within that subject area so scopus allows you to look at the source title the source titles and it um lists the journal titles that include the most the most articles that are that are the same as the one of the topic that you are searching for so this is then a very important area of determining which other core journals that you should be looking at when you are reading for this for this topic that you are working on then also look at who are the top authors for any research that you are conducting. It's important to make sure that you include the research of the top authors for that fulfill that subject area so once again within information science lotka's law determines that in any given subject area there are a small number of highly productive scientists and a large number of scientists with lower productivity and it is important to find the core authors for a topic by looking at the volume of their publications in that specific field so scopus as in the example that i've included on the screen scopus then lists um the the authors that have been most productive within a um within the topic that you are researching so moving on also making sure that you find the right type of document.
Scopus provides an overview of the document types in a topic so for example in engineering topics you will have more conference proceedings for example. Um and in this in this analysis that scopus provides you will be guided to the review articles as well you will see on the screen for this specific topic. You have a larger number of articles um and then you have a number of conference proceedings and also a number of review articles so document type is useful for knowing what type of literature to focus on arts and humanities. Uh this this this pie chart will look completely different for example because you will have more books um so this also guides um the type of documents that you should be looking for when you are looking for information and then uh just to keep in mind that if you focus on your review article so if you start reading uh for a specific subject area art the review articles can be very useful because they will provide you with a summary of the literature that is available within that specific topic. Then finally scopus also shows you the breakdown of the sub-disciplines within the topic so even if you are an engineer you can you can see how your topic overlaps with other subject areas and that also allows you to narrow down your reading if you are looking at a subject from a specific perspective so even if it's um so for instance also engineering but you look you want to look and how it overlaps with environmental signs and that is how you want to focus your reading this. This analysis will allow you to do that so um by clicking on the information this is not live now we will look at it live in a minute. You will find all the articles all the publications that have a reference to to to environmental science for example. Okay so the fourth smart thing to do is to find related material and scopus uses a special algorithm to do that so that you make sure that you're not missing out on important literature so by we will look at this now in a minute but also finding related documents.
How this is done is by looking at other documents that have the same references or have the same authors and this is a very powerful way of leading you to other important documents within a specific subject area then finally of course it is important uh it is very useful if you can focus on the most scientific and the most shared shape publications um citation is is widely accepted as an indicator of a publication significance or its contribution to the development or the understanding of a topic and then similarly social media activity also provides valuable information about the novelty of the research result based on the fact that it is more immediate in social media. It's more immediate and it comes from a diverse audience so you will have practitioners educators and the general public when they mention or when they share information via social media it gives a very immediate indication of the importance of a certain publication. So in scopus we have um the option in the in the um in the image on the screen you will see that there's an option on the right hand side where once you have your document results or your set results. There's an option to use cited by and this is a sort option so that you can look at the articles or the publications that are most cited first so that you have a clear. Indication of these are regarded as the most valued publications by other researchers because they have cited um and you will find you can also further evaluate the importance or the significance of the publications. Then by looking at the article level metrics that are provided in scopus. So you will have. We have in scopus. You have scholarly activity so for example when a publication has been shared in mendeley. Uh whether it has been um mentioned within a blog or in wikipedia as a social commentary social scholarly commentary actually and then also mass media so if a article has been tweeted or mentioned in facebook these are also counted and it gives you an indication of which is the most most immediate value that is attached to a specific article.
Okay so this just brings me to the end of a of my slide where i wanted to give you an overview of five smart ways that you can that you can use um so this was just to recap on. Those is to make sure that you're using the right database and to make sure that your database that you are using like scopus provides you with the um the comprehensive information the relevant information the easy to use and then using tips and tricks analyzing your search results being able to find your related material and focusing on the most cited and the most shared so now we can go to scopus itself and i just want to show all of these. This is the theory now. Let's see in practice whether it in indeed helps you to find better results so i'm going to open my scopus myoscopus right okay. I'm going to do a an example of a search and try to use some of the features that i've just mentioned to you um so in the first place i'm going to use um i'm going to use my curly brackets so i'm going to use solar desalination this and i've used the curly brackets for that and i'm going to use on the right hand side. There's an option to search in article title so that we have a very. This is a very no uh focused narrow way of searching. We want to make sure that solar desalination that exact phrase will be present in the article title then we can add using the boolean operator and we can also look for water filtration. I'm actually going to use. I'm not sure i'm not sure how this phrase may be used in a public location. So i'm going to add the asterisk there waterfall trade or it can be water filtering and i'm going to say that this can be searched for in all fields so it might be in the abstract using the limit to the date range. We can limit to published between 2 000 and present right so we've got solar desalination in our curly brackets we've used a boolean operator and we are combining that with water filtration but we're not exactly sure how the word is used within the publication so we are using the um the wild card the asterisk to be able to have more flexibility for the phrase to be used.
I'm not going to do any further filtering and then we can search so you see we have 33 document results for this search and the and you will see underneath you have further refinement options so you can further refine and you can see you can design you. Want to look at only the publications of a specific year you already have a listing a small listing of the top authors within this the subject or this topic you can falter by just clicking in one of them and looking at those publications only and this is a breakdown of the subject area the document type the source titles the keywords affiliation the country the source type and the language so really a a big variety of ways that you can further refine and filter your search. I'm not going to use any of these further now. I want to show you how you can analyze the results. Now so you just click on analyze the search results as i showed in my slides. I'm just waiting for that to appear and here you can see the publication trend by year so really spiking there within from 2009 um and then also between 2011 and 2014. Uh the publications um this is a. This is a natural decline because all the publications from 2015 have not been indexed within scopus yet um but illustrating uh that it is possible to view your documents or to further analyze to see whether this document this topic is increasing in its interest or whether it is declining and you can see a very very clear increase in the interest with authors that are publishing in this area now to be sure that you uh read the right journals and make sure that you cover this comprehensively scopus provides you with the top journals in which these articles have been published and these are all live links you can actually click on them and you can read the publications by a journal by the journal title first all the articles within a specific journal title if that makes sense to you scopus further provides you then with the feature that you can compare the journals based on the metrics that are within scopus but we're not going to focus on that at the moment at this moment we want to look at making sure that you know which are the top journals in your research area another way of analyzing as i mentioned is then looking at the top authors and by clicking on the author you can see the publications and you can read the publications and author by author you can see also who are the most who are the most prominent um institutions that are publishing in the specific research area this is usually very interesting for master students and for phd students and also for postdocs to see where they can build where they can build their collaborations but an overview of which institutions are focusing within a specific research.
Area you can also see the countries and by clicking um on the left hand side of in the panel you can select only seeing the countries uh which are most interested in so in terms of egypt for example you can see eight documents were published in this on this topic and if you click on egypt you will you will see the actual publications and you can read them the document type. Um in this instance you will see that. There are many conference papers for example so 37 of this 73 results that we received are conference papers 60 are research articles and uh 2.7 or review articles so these review articles usually give a very a good summary of the publications within this. Um within this topic so these are usually very useful to look at and then a further analysis of the subject area so you will see that this this topic overlaps um with all links to engineering energy environmental materials science chemical engineering. So you can decide in terms of which emphasis you want to place whether it is on desalination from a material science perspective so that you can also focus your reading around a specific approach that you have for this for this topic right so that brings us to the end of the ways that you can analyze your search results and i want to show you further examples of how you can find related documents there.
So i'm going to repeat this. Um the system remembers my my last search i can just search again and get my 73 documents and now i want to see whether i can find any. I'm going to first search. Show you the cited by and then we can look at the related documents so as i showed in my presentation in the slides. Once you have your results you can click on a sort on option so we want to see our results by the number of times. A document has been cited. So that if we can look at the most important publications first so yoga will see the number of citations guiding you to showing you what the significance is of that specific article then and you can look at also you can also get an overview of who has cited those publications right so that is how you focus on the most cited. I'm going to select. I'm going to select say the second one so once you've clicked on a search result it is going to open you with the document details of this um of this publication so you see the um the the name of the journal you see the title you see the abstract and then on the right hand side it shows you the number of items that have been that uh that it has. That's cited this article and you can view all of them and look at those as well as i mentioned. Um also you can have a look at the metrics that are provided the social media metrics. So these show. This shows that this document besides the 58 citations that it is received it has a and it has a field weighted citation impact um that is more than the world average where one represents the world average or the scope is average. So this is 63 more cited than any other documents in the same subject area um within scopus and also gives you the idea.
Here comes the more social media matrix giving you an indication of the number of times this document was shared within rain delay for example so these are two ways that you can look at the significance or have an idea of the significance of of the publication that you are looking at that it has been cited and that it also has had impact within the social sphere where it has been shared with other researchers so i want to go back to my results and show you another example of this. Um let me just see energy efficiency. I'm going to show you one way. We have more social commentary for example no not that one just going back to the results let me just click through a few of them and see what kind of metrics we have. I'm just going to see one last time right. I've got i'm going to open view all metric. Uh to give you an indication of the kinds of metrics that you will be able to see. Yeah so we've talked about the citation overview. You can talk about if we've talked about mendeley sharing um and this is a mention a social commentary. It was mentioned in a blog for example so this specific publication was also mentioned within a blog and you can do all scholarly communication. It was also mentioned in so it was mentioned in wikipedia. So this all helps you uh to determine what the significance is of the article that you are working with and allowing you to focus on the most important first right so i'm going back to show you related documents so here we have. This is one of the examples of the of the results of the article results. And if you see on the right hand side in the right hand panel you have the option of related documents so as i mentioned in the presentation you can. The related documents are based on the references on on other documents that have uh that are that overlap in terms of the references of those articles but also of the authors. And you can find more you can these are the top three and then you can do all related documents based on references or you can find more related documents and scopus based on authors or keywords as well so let's just click on that authors for example so if you want to do further reading on authors that have some that have similar publications.
You can do that on top. You have a little menu where you can look at show references as well so these are the documents that share the same references as the documents that you received in your results. I'm just going back here looking and view all the documents that have that are similar. You can select the references for example so this is the references of the document that you are looking at and you can select whether which other of these documents you would like to further. Look at to see whether they also will be useful for your for your topic right so this was the example that i wanted to share with you. It was looking at solar desalination that we combined with water filtration um what we did is we we faulted and we refined we decided we only wanted to look at documents between 2000 and and and present we analyzed their results to determine which were the top journals which were the top authors whether in terms of date with this has increasing um importance within the research area whether it's a growing emphasis or not or whether it's declining then we looked at the most cited and we also looked at finding related documents. So i'm going to turn back to my presentation. I'm opening that so with this. I want to conclude um scopus is indeed a comprehensive and multidisciplinary index of high high quality scholarly material which covers a wide range of publication has powerful search capabilities and it is easy to use. I hope that was able to demonstrate that it empowers you to find relevant academic material quicker through allowing you to analyze your search results and to find related material and to focus on most cited and shared publications um and it has several features such as um but scopus also has several features such as alerts and downloading and creating bibliographies and looking at journal metrics and h indexes and much more so we were not able to cover all of this but we invite you to tune in for more webinars than on these topics that i've mentioned.
Now i also want to invite you to stay in touch and follow the health of your africa. Latest news you can follow us on facebook and on the scopus blog and with that thank you and i look forward to hearing whether there are any questions and for your feedback. Thank you very much. Thank you very much everyone so if you have any questions please just unmute yourself from uh on the left side of your name on the attendance list or you can ask your questions on the chat module so you'll find the chat module the last one on the screen so you can write your question so any questions.