SCOPUS for Science and Medicine Gabriella Netting Gabriella Netting Penny Roberts Penny Roberts 16 January, January, 2008

Science WISER for Hilary Term: training/wiser/science training/wiser/science

If you get stuck… Subject specialists: Bio- and Environmental Science and Environmental Science Physical Sciences:Physical Sciences: Medical SciencesMedical Sciences

What is your subject? A. Medicine B. Bio- Environmental Sciences C. Physical Sciences D. Social Sciences E. Other

Are you... A. An undergraduate B. Post-graduate / Research Student C. Academic/Research staff D. Other

What is Scopus?  Scopus is a large abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources.  Works with SCIRUS search engine

What does it have?  15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers (patents, open access journals, conference proceedings, book series, etc)  33 million abstracts  Results from 386 million scientific web pages  21 million patent records from 5 patent offices

Added value:  Intuitive searching  Tools to sort, refine and quickly identify results  Alerts to keep you up-to-date on new articles matching your search query, or by favourite author  Many full text links

Scopus : “the broadest source of STM and Social Sciences information” 14,20014,200 2,7002,7002,5002,5004,5004,5005,9005,900 Life & Health (100% Medline) Chemistry Physics Engineering Biological Agricultural Environmental Social Sciences Psychology Economics 4,000 publishers STM & Social Sciences.

Content   Medline records 1966 –   Content from other Elsevier databases*: Embase Compendex Geobase 1980-

Functionality  Searching  Limits  Sorting results  Citation searching  Search History  Alerts  Output

Why use Scopus?  Scholarly, interdisciplinary content  Weekly or daily updates  Complex searching and refining results  Searches databases and the web simultaneously  Search history can be viewed  Current awareness alerts can be set up  Easy to set up bibliography of results

Strengths  User friendly, intuitive  Inter-disciplinary academic content  Good for any science topic  Good for free-text, keyword searching  Simultaneous web and patent searches  Citation searching (back to 1996)  Alerts, to keep you up to date with research  Many links to full text  Regular updates/improvements  Good help pages and online support

Weaknesses  No controlled vocabulary/ subject heading searching  Citation searching more comprehensive in Web of Knowledge  Clinical queries - use Medline / PubMed

Other features  Also searches the web via SCIRUS, Elsevier’s science search engine 

Why Scirus?  To pinpoint scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data on the Web  To find the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles, patents, pre prints, theses and journals that other search engines miss.

Why Scirus cont.  Filters out non-scientific sites (e.g. REM )  Searches a combination of web information, preprint servers, digital archives, repositories and patent and journal databases

Scopus tutorial This is available from: Oxlip/Title/Scopus/Online Tutorial from Informs

Presentation is available: training

Sample search: What are the effects of climate change and global warming on fisheries Search as: Search as: (climate change OR global warming) AND fisheries

Would you now feel confident to use Scopus? A. Yes. B. Need more practice. C. No.

Would you consider using Scopus for your own work? A. Yes. B. No. C. Maybe

Topics you can try…  What are the ethical implications of face transplants?  How does solar power help with the problem of global warming?  How is airplane safety affected by metal fatigue?

Next week’s session Resources for Mathematics and Computing