Sorting Results

Return to Scopus Results

Scopus results pages display documents listed in order of publication date, with the most recent date listed first. The list can be sorted on a number of criteria by clicking on the appropriate column heading.

Dark blue shading and the presence of an arrowhead in the column indicates the category under which the list is presently sorted. You can reverse the order (ascending or descending) of sorting by clicking on the arrow (except in the case of Relevance). Sorting applies to the entire set of results, not just the 2,000 displayed at the time.

Sorting of Scopus results can be performed as follows:

Note	Web and Custom can only be sorted based on Date and Document (Sort by relevance). Articles with an unknown publication date are treated as the oldest articles.

Publication date:	Click Date to sort on publication date. Results are shown in descending order (most recent first).
Author name:	Click Author(s) to sort on surname of first author. Documents that do not have an author name will display at the bottom of the list when sorting in ascending order or at the top of the list when sorting in descending order.
Times cited:	Click Cited By to sort on number of times cited by other articles.
Source Title:	Click Source Title to sort on the journal name, book title, or other source in which the document was published. Documents that do not have a source title will display at the bottom of the list when sorting in ascending order or at the top of the list when sorting in descending order.
Relevance:	Click Document (Sort by relevance) to rank the results listing those which best match the query first. Inverse sorting is not possible here.

Secondary Sort Order

The secondary sort order for results lists depends on the type of list. Scopus provides the following secondary sort orders:

Search Results:	Clicking Date will sort records by Date and then by Document (Sort by relevance).
Saved Lists and My List:	Clicking Date will sort records by Date and then by Document Title.