Considering the terms you will use to search is an important step in the search process. Terms that are too broad or narrow can result in overwhelming or incomplete searches. Try keeping a list of keywords or terms that you see others using in articles and databases as you develop your search strategy - your terms will adjust the more you read.
As an example, if you're interested in the behavior of methane gas in landfills, you might explore the following keywords:
174-82-8 (CAS Registry Number)
methane (substance name)
CH 4 (formula)
landfills
cover soil
soil
oxidation
oxygen limitation
ammonium
NH 4 +
Remember that when searching indexes for more than one term it is necessary to combine your keywords into one search statement by using Boolean Operators, OR and AND (and sometimes NOT).
Operator | Use | Example |
---|---|---|
OR | Combine similar terms into a group. Will retrieve citations with any of the terms. | 174-82-8 or methane or CH 4 |
AND | Combine different terms. Will retrieve citations with all of the terms. | methane and soil and landfill |
NOT | Excludes terms from a search. (Use sparingly.) | methane not natural gas |
If the search doesn't yield enough results, you might try a broader search without so many restrictions.
Attaching a wild card symbol to the end of a root word is called truncation. When used in a search, the database will search for the root word and alternate endings. For example, oxid* will retrieve items with the words oxidation or oxidize or oxidate. The symbol used for truncation varies from database to database. For example, Scopus uses an asterisk (*). Use the individual database's Help system or your librarian to determine if it allows truncation and what the symbol is.
You can search for: documents (includes journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings), authors, or affiliations.
The default search, a document search, includes title, abstract, and author-provided keywords. Scopus connects search terms with an implicit AND when you enter two or more terms.
Scopus automatically will search for: accented characters, lemmatization (plural / adjectival forms), and equivalents ("behavior" and "behaviour").
Scopus ignores punctuation and stop words ("the", "it", "of").
Operator | Use | Example |
---|---|---|
OR | At least one term must appear | liver OR cirrhosis |
AND | Both terms must appear | addiction and behavior |
AND NOT | Exclude one term | lung AND NOT cancer |
" " | Loose phrase search, looks for words together, but will include singular/plurals and wildcards | "addictive behavior" |
{ } | Exact phrase search, looks for the exact phrase or word | {color} will return color, not colour |
* | Wildcard search, looks for the root word and alternate endings or beginnings | Enxym* will return enzyme, enzymes, enzymatic, and enzymology |
? | Wildcard search, looks for the word with any single character in place of the ? | ?NA with retrieve RNA or DNA |
W/# | Proximity search, terms must be # number of words near each other, in any order | zika W/2 virus |
PRE/# | Proximity search, terms must be # number of words near each other, in a order | "whole genome" PRE/4 sequence |
Use the left-hand sidebar to search with results.
The left-hand search bar also has facets to limit results by: year, author, subject, document type, source, keyword, affiliation, and language.
You can use Scopus to conduct a cited reference search. Typically, cited reference searching involves having a scholarly work in-hand that you like and you want to see who else has used that work in their research.
Search for the work you have in-hand as a document search in Scopus. Include keywords from the title and the last name of the first author.
Locate your work in the search results list.
On the right hand side, you can see how many times the work was cited.
Click on the Cited by number to open up a search results list of just works that have cited the paper you have in hand.
You can then limit those results or search within them using the facets and search box on the left-hand side.
This work by the Reed College Library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International License.
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