Scopus

Scientific search system

For other uses, see Scopus (disambiguation).

Scopus

Producer| Elsevier (Netherlands)
History| 2004-present
Languages| 40[citation needed]
Access
Providers| Elsevier
Cost| Subscription
Coverage
Disciplines| Life sciences, Social sciences, Physical sciences, Health sciences
Record depth| Index, abstract and citation indexing
Format coverage| Articles, articles-in-press, books, chapters, conference papers, data papers, editorials, errata, letters, notes, patents, preprints, retracted articles, reviews, short surveys
Temporal coverage| 1788-present
Geospatial coverage| Worldwide
No. of records| 100 million
Update frequency| Daily
Print edition
ISSN| 2588-9885
Links
Website| www.scopus.com
Title list(s)| www.scopus.com/sources

Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004.[1][needs update] The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvement in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price. Free database The Lens completes the triad of main universal academic research databases.[citation needed]

Journals in Scopus are reviewed for sufficient quality each year according to four numerical measures: h-Index, CiteScore, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (source normalized impact per paper). For this reason, the journals listed in Scopus are considered to meet the requirement for peer review quality established by several research grant agencies for their grant recipients and by degree-accreditation boards in a number of countries.[2]

Scopus also allows patent searches from a dedicated patent database, Lexis-Nexis, albeit with limited functionality.[3] At present, Scopus indexes the following patent databases: United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); European Patent Office (EPO); Japan Patent Office (JPO): World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); UK Intellectual Property Office.[4][5]

## Overview

[edit]

Comparing ease of use and coverage of Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS), a 2006 study concluded that Scopus is "easy to navigate, even for the novice user.[…]The ability to search both forward and backward from a particular citation would be very helpful to the researcher. The multidisciplinary aspect allows the researcher to easily search outside of his discipline." and "One advantage of WOS over Scopus is the depth of coverage, with the full WOS database going back to 1945 and Scopus going back to 1966. However, Scopus and WOS complement each other as neither resource is all inclusive."[6] A small number of studies found approximately an 80-90% overlap in coverage between WoS and Scopus for the period between 1990 and 2020.

In terms of the structured query language search capabilities Scopus is somewhat more advanced than Web of Science: for example, WoS can perform only NEAR/n queries, Scopus can also do PRE/n queries.[7][jargon]

Also, when the same article was covered in Scopus and in the Web of Science, its Scopus entry had a keyword ratio 3-5 of than its WoS counterpart, and the Scopus keywords are more focused on the specific article content, whereas WoS has more keywords related to the broad category of the article's subject. A larger number of narrow-targeted keywords allows Scopus users to find a larger number of relevant publications, while filtering out false positives. On the other hand, WoS exports (e.g. in the RIS format) the DOI numbers of cited articles, while Scopus exports the titles of cited articles. Also, Scopus allows exporting 20,000 references (e.g., as a RIS file) at once, while WoS export is limited to 5,000 references at once.

Scopus provides chemical search by CAS number and by chemical name, while WoS does not have these features. On the other hand, WoS has chemical structure search, but only a small number of publications are actually indexed for chemical structure searches. SciFinder is the preferred option for chemical searches is all cases.

Scopus also offers author profiles which cover affiliations, number of publications and their bibliographic data, references, and details on the number of citations each published document has received. It has alerting features that allow registered users to track changes to a profile and a facility to calculate authors' h-index. In 2016, a gratis website, Scopus CiteScore,[8] was introduced. It provides citation data for all 25,000+ active titles such as journals, conference proceedings and books in Scopus and provides an alternative to the impact factor, a journal-level indicator which may correlate negatively with reliability.[9]

Scopus IDs for individual authors can be integrated with the non-proprietary digital identifier ORCID.[10]

In 2018, Scopus started embedding partial information about the open access status of works, using Unpaywall data.[11] However, Scopus' RIS export files do not contain the information about Open Access status.[citation needed]

Several studies looked into the comparison of the number of publications indexed in the academic research databases. In a 2024 publication from the University of Jordan the publications from their university referenced in several databases were compared. The authors found, that the degree of coverage decreases in the order: Scopus, Web of Science, The Lens.[12]

A 2024 study from Spain concluded that zero-cost The Lens, which combined the data from Crossref, PubMed, Core and OpenAlex, had the largest coverage, with more than 247 million bibliographic records.[13] No-cost Open Alex had the second largest coverage of about 240 million publications in total. Free SciLit came in third with 149 million of publications agglomerated from Crossref, PubMed, preprint repositories and publishers. Web of Science Core Collection came in fourth with 85 million. records. Scopus was the fifth with 78 million records. While no database was comprehensive, the coverage overlap between any two databases was substantial.

A 2025 study from a medical university in China limited to scleral contact lenses concluded, that Scopus had 3.6% more references than Web of Science.[14]

## Content selection and advisory board

[edit]

Since Elsevier is the owner of Scopus and is also one of the main international publishers of scientific journals, an independent and international Scopus Content Selection and advisory board (CSAB) was established in 2009 to prevent a potential conflict of interest in the choice of journals to be included in the database and to maintain an open and transparent content coverage policy, regardless of publisher.[15] The board consists of scientists and subject librarians. Nevertheless, critique over a perceived conflict of interest has continued.[16]

CSAB team is responsible for inclusion and exclusion of different titles on Scopus. The list of journals and books indexed in Scopus is updated 2 to 3 times per year. Each year Scopus receives around 3,500 submissions for new titles to be included and accepts approximately 25% of them.[17] The re-evaluation policy is based on four criteria of Publication Concern, Under Performance, Outlier Performance and Continuous curation. Between 2004 and 2020, Scopus included 46,534[18] and excluded 688 titles[19] Between 2016 and 2023, the CSAB has re-evaluated 990 titles published by 539 different publishers, leading to 536 titles discontinued for indexing.[20] In 2024 Scopus covered around 28,000 active journals and nearly 300,000 books.

Nevertheless, research continues to show the inclusion of predatory journals.[21][22]

While marketed as a global point of reference, Scopus and WoS have been characterised as "structurally biased against research produced in non-Western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences".[23]

## Scopus AI

[edit]

Scopus AI, launched by Elsevier in January 2024, is a generative AI tool designed to revolutionize research by leveraging the world's largest database of curated scientific literature. This functionality aims to assist researchers and institutions in obtaining fast, accurate summaries and insights to enhance research collaboration and societal impact.[24]

According to Maxim Khan, then the VP of Analytics, Products and Data Platform at Elsevier, Scopus AI provides the following benefits:

* Expanded summaries
* Foundational and Influential paper identification
* Academic Expert Search which is a form of search dedicated to identifying experts in specific fields.[25]

## Derived citation metrics

[edit]

See also: Source Normalized Impact per Paper, Field-weighted Citation Impact, and Science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators

### CiteScore

[edit]

This section is an excerpt from CiteScore.[edit]

CiteScore (CS) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is produced by Elsevier, based on the citations recorded in the Scopus database. Absolute rankings and percentile ranks are also reported for each journal in a given subject area.[26]

This journal evaluation metric was launched in December 2016 as an alternative to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor (IF), calculated by Clarivate. CiteScore is based on the citations collected for articles published in the preceding four years, instead of two or five in the JCR IF. This enhanced methodology was introduced with the release of CiteScore 2019 in June 2020. At launch, CiteScore's neutrality was questioned by bibliometrics experts like Carl Bergstrom, who found it appeared to favour Elsevier's titles over Nature's.[27]

### SCImago Journal Rank

[edit]

This section is an excerpt from SCImago Journal Rank.[edit]

The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator is a measure of the prestige of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the prestige of the journals where the citations come from.

## See also

[edit]

* Journalology
* List of academic databases and search engines

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Goodman, David; Deis, Louise (January 2005). "Web of Science (2004 version) and Scopus". The Charleston Advisor. 6 (3). Annual Reviews: 5–21\. eISSN 1525-4003. ISSN 1525-4011. Retrieved 12 August 2023.
2. ^ Huang, Ying; Li, Ruinan; Zhang, Lin; Sivertsen, Gunnar (8 April 2021). Yang, Liying (ed.). "A comprehensive analysis of the journal evaluation system in China". Quantitative Science Studies. 2 (1). The MIT Press: 300–326\. doi:10.1162/qss_a_00103. eISSN 2641-3337. hdl:11250/2733769. Retrieved 19 May 2023.
3. ^ Kulkarni, A. V.; Aziz, B.; Shams, I.; Busse, J. W. (2009). "Comparisons of Citations in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for Articles Published in General Medical Journals". JAMA. 302 (10): 1092–6\. doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1307. PMID 19738094.
4. ^ "Scopus Content Coverage Guide" (PDF). Elsevier. 14 February 2025. Retrieved 14 February 2025.
5. ^ "Patents and Trademarks | Library databases that contain Patents". University of South Florida. 14 February 2025. Retrieved 14 February 2025.
6. ^ Burnham, Judy F. (8 March 2006). "Scopus database: a review". Biomedical Digital Libraries. 3 (1) 1. BioMed Central. doi:10.1186/1742-5581-3-1. ISSN 1742-5581. PMC 1420322. PMID 16522216.
7. ^ Echchakoui, Saïd (2020). "Why and how to merge Scopus and Web of Science during bibliometric analysis: The case of sales force literature from 1912 to 2019". Journal of Marketing Analytics. 8 (3): 165–184\. doi:10.1057/s41270-020-00081-9. S2CID 256510471. Archived from the original on 18 May 2023. Retrieved 18 May 2023.
8. ^ "Sources". Scopus. Archived from the original on 27 December 2016. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
9. ^ Brembs, Björn (2018). "Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 12 37\. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037. PMC 5826185. PMID 29515380.
10. ^ "Scopus2Orcid". Scopus. Archived from the original on 24 July 2014. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
11. ^ Else, Holly (15 August 2018). "How Unpaywall is transforming open science". Nature. 560 (7718): 290–291\. Bibcode:2018Natur.560..290E. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05968-3. PMID 30111793.
12. ^ Tarazi, Alaa (1 June 2024). "Comparative Analysis of the Bibliographic Data Sources Using PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Lens: Comparative Analysis of Bibliographic Data Sources". High Yield Medical Reviews. 2 (1). High Yield Medicine. doi:10.59707/hymrUNHW4628. ISSN 2960-1630. Retrieved 29 May 2025.
13. ^ Ortega, José Luis; Delgado‑Quirós, Lorena (28 June 2024). "The indexation of retracted literature in seven principal scholarly databases: a coverage comparison of dimensions, OpenAlex, PubMed, Scilit, Scopus, The Lens and Web of Science". Scientometrics. 129 (7). Springer Nature: 3769–3785\. doi:10.1007/s11192-024-05034-y. eISSN 1588-2861. ISSN 0138-9130.
14. ^ Yin, Min; Zhao, Chenpei; You, Jia; Ding, Wenzhi; Jiang, Dongdong; Tian, Yuyin; Shi, Lin; Leng, Lin (14 February 2025). Berry, Simon (ed.). "Bibliometric and Visual Analysis of the Status of Scleral Lens Research Based on the Web of Science Database and Scopus Database (2014-2024)". Clinical Optometry. 17. Dove Medical Press: 47–60\. doi:10.2147/OPTO.S495970. ISSN 1179-2752. PMC 11834708. PMID 39967862.
15. ^ "Scopus Content Overview: Content Policy and Selection". Scopus Info. Elsevier. Archived from the original on 24 April 2015. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
16. ^ "Elsevier are corrupting open science in Europe". TheGuardian.com. 29 June 2018. Archived from the original on 5 January 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
17. ^ Wilches-Visbal JH, Pérez-Anaya O, Castillo-Pedraza MC. Discontinued Reasons of Journals in Scopus: Analysis and Reflections. Bibl, An Investig. 2024;20(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377727326_Discontinued_reasons_of_journals_in_SCOPUS_analysis_and_reflections?enrichId=rgreq-3545ee0db7d9f06d060445d5327f9219-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzM3NzcyNzMyNjtBUzoxMTQzMTI4MTIyMDIzODc5NkAxNzA2MzI0NjAxNDg1&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationCoverPdf
18. ^ "Scopus Indexed Journals". IndexHub. 31 December 2024. Retrieved 31 December 2024.
19. ^ "extlistJune2021". Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
20. ^ "The importance of high-quality content: curation and reevaluation in Scopus" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
21. ^ "IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus". idea-en.cerge-ei.cz. Archived from the original on 27 July 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
22. ^ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (8 February 2021). "Hundreds of 'predatory' journals indexed on leading scholarly database". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00239-0. PMID 33558751. S2CID 231871351.
23. ^ Tennant, Jonathan P. (27 October 2020). "Web of Science and Scopus are not global databases of knowledge". European Science Editing. 46 e51987. doi:10.3897/ese.2020.e51987. ISSN 2518-3354.
24. ^ "Launch of Scopus AI to Help Researchers Navigate the World of Research". Elsevier. 16 January 2024. Retrieved 14 February 2025.
25. ^ Carpenter, Todd (25 July 2024). "A Look Under the Hood of Scopus AI: An Interview with Maxim Khan". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 14 February 2025.
26. ^ "How are CiteScore metrics used in Scopus?". Scopus: Access and use Support Center. 29 July 2022. Retrieved 24 May 2023.
27. ^ Straumsheim, Carl. "How to Measure Impact". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 13 August 2023.

## External links

[edit]

Wikidata has the properties:

* Scopus author ID (P1153) (see uses)
* Scopus EID (P1154) (see uses)
* Scopus affiliation ID (P1155) (see uses)
* Scopus source ID (P1156) (see uses)

* Official website

* v
* t
* e

RELX

Elsevier|

| Imprints|

* Academic Press
* Butterworth-Heinemann
* Cell Press
* Churchill Livingstone
* Masson
* Medicine Publishing
* Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
* Mosby
* Pergamon
* Saunders
* William Andrew
* Woodhead Publishing

|

Selected
journals|

* Biochimica et Biophysica Acta
* Cell
* Current Opinion
* The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
* The Lancet
* Tetrahedron
* Trends
* List of Elsevier periodicals

Other|

* Bepress
* Ei Compendex
* Embase
* GEOBASE
* HESI
* Mendeley
* Reaxys
* ScienceDirect
* Scirus (defunct)
* Scopus
* SSRN

LexisNexis|

| Legal and Professional|

* CaseMap
* Law360
* Martindale-Hubbell
* Quicklaw
* Reed Tech
* Shepard's Citations

|

Risk|

* Estates Gazette
* LexisNexis Risk Solutions

RX|

| Business
conventions|

* Arabian Travel Market
* Equitana
* Global Gaming Expo
* London Book Fair
* MIPCOM
* MIPTV Media Market
* National Hardware Show

|

ReedPop|

* Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo
* EGX
* Emerald City Comic Con
* Florida Supercon
* MCM London Comic Con
* New York Comic Con
* PAX
* Star Wars Celebration

Category

* v
* t
* e

Academic publishing

Journals|

* Academic journal
* Public health

Papers|

* Paper
* Abstract
* Review article
* Position paper
* Literature review

Grey literature|

* Working paper
* White paper
* Technical report
* Annual report
* Pamphlet
* Essay
* Lab notes

Other publication types|

* Thesis
* Collection of articles
* Patent
* Biological
* Chemical
* Book
* Monograph
* Chapter
* Treatise
* Poster session
* Proceedings

Impact and ranking|

* Acknowledgment index
* Altmetrics
* Article-level metrics
* Author-level metrics
* Bibliometrics
* C-score
* Journal ranking
* Eigenfactor
* g-index
* h-index
* Impact factor
* Rankings of academic publishers
* Science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators
* Scientometrics
* SCImago Journal Rank
* Citation cartel

Reform and access|

* Academic journal publishing reform
* Open access
* Citation advantage
* Serials crisis
* Sci-Hub
* #ICanHazPDF

Versioning|

* Preprint
* Postprint
* Version of record
* Erratum
* Retraction

Indexes and search engines|

* Google Scholar
* AMiner
* BASE
* CORE
* Semantic Scholar
* Scopus
* Web of Science
* Paperity
* OpenAlex
* Index Copernicus
* ERIH PLUS
* Sherpa Romeo
* OpenAIRE

Related topics|

* Imprint
* Scientific writing
* Peer review
* Scholarly communication
* Scientific literature
* Learned society
* Open research
* Open scientific data
* ORCID
* Electronic publishing
* Ingelfinger rule
* Least publishable unit
* "Publish or perish"

Lists|

* Academic databases and search engines
* Academic journals
* Copyright policies
* Highly Cited Researchers
* Open-access journals
* Preprint policies
* Scientific journals
* Style/formatting guides
* University presses

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