Bibliometrics & Responsible Research Evaluation: Scopus (Elsevier)

Within Scopus you can search Documents, Authors, Researcher Discovery, Organizations and Scopus AI. Documents encompass journal articles, book chapters, articles in press, data papers, and conference proceedings. When carrying out a search by author you can search by first  and/or last name, additionally you can search by ORCID iD.

Cited Reference Search

You can also search lists of cited references in articles, books, etc. This is a useful tool if the reference you are starting with is highly relevant to your research. This compiles lists of other related source material that are linked to your original cited reference, which my also be of relevance to your research. Cited reference searching can be a helpful addition to your standard keyword search. 

More video tutorials are available from Scopus on the link below.

Scopus AI allows researchers use natural language to search for materials on Scopus. For example a use could ask "How do community gardens influence social inclusion?"

Scopus provides answers based only on their scholarly reviewed content. Answers are made of a summary, expanded summary, references, concept map, emerging themes and topic experts. While this new feature offers easy access to information, users should always evaluate the accuracy, sources and possible bias.

Note: The actual demonostration begins at about 13 minutes into the video.

You can set up an account and register as an individual user in Scopus in order to save searches for topics or authors. Additionally you can set up alerts to be notified about new citations to an article of your own or otherwise. This can be useful to ensure your work that is published is being linked to the correct author profile.  

By creating a Scopus account you can customise the following to get more out of the Scopus database:

• Set up alerts
• Monitor author profiles
• Access your dashboard

Within the dashboard section you can:  

• See author correction requests
• Access Scopus support
• Set and manage alerts

Throughout Scopus metrics are integrated into the journal, article and author profiles, in order to aid the evaluation of authors, journals and articles. These metrics can also show detailed accounts of research areas to help provide insights as to what is currently happening in a given subject area. You can compare up to 10 sources at a time and examine the results in table or a chart format.

Article-level metrics (ALMs) include:

• Create graphs
• Link to citing documents
• Compare citation counts
• Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) - measures the citation impact of an article relative to the average in its field
• Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) - similar to FWCI, this metric is field-normalized and can be applied across different subject areas
• PlumX Metrics - includes measures such as total citations and online attention scores, indicating the extent of utilization and discussion in scientific circles

Journal-level metrics include: 

• CiteScore metrics
• Source normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP)
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 

Author metrics include: 

• Citation overview tracker
• Analyse author output
• h-index - measures both the productivity and citation impact of an author's publications. It is widely used but can be inflated by self-citations
• h-graph - a graphical representation of the h-index
• g-index - gives more weight to highly cited articles, providing a measure that can complement the h-index
• i10-index - counts the number of publications with at least ten citations
• t-index -  uses Shannon entropy & yearly average of h-index, aims to provide a fair comparison among authors or institutions

Alternative Metrics

• Altmetric.com Data - scopus includes altmetric data such as blog counts, Twitter mentions, and other social media activities, which can help identify publications with high citation impact
• Altmetric Attention Scores - reflects the online attention an article receives, including mentions in news articles, social media, and policy documents

Scopus author profiles provide researchers with data that they can use to:

• display research output
• Showcase impact and collaborations
• Update personal and organisational websites, CV’s and institutional profiles.
• Identify future potential of researchers to employers and funding agencies.

Some of the above can be used to evaluate your work in part, to inform promotion and hiring decisions and to aid in the selection process for awarding grants to individual researchers or teams of researchers.

It is important to review your author profile semi-regularly to ensure it is up to date with current publications, and citations.