Search Tips

Choose Specific Search Terms

Select specific search terms to narrow your search:

• Choose search terms which are specific or closely related to the topic you want to retrieve.

• Include alternative words and abbreviations.

• Avoid words that are too general, such as cell or behaviour.

• A single character is treated as a whole word and can be combined with other terms.

Search Is Not Case-Sensitive

The search is not case-sensitive. It does not matter whether you use capitals or lower case.

Singular Term Finds Plurals

Using the singular word form will retrieve the singular, plural, and possessive forms of most words.

Scopus applies word stemming to fields containing text, (not to names, affiliations, dates, or numbers). Word stemming ensures that different occurrences of a word are found.

• Example

  Entering criterion will locate criteria and criterion.

Use Wildcards

The use of wildcard characters can broaden your search.

• Use a question mark (?) to replace a single character.

  Example

  analy?e finds analyse or analyze.

• Use an asterisk (*) as a multi-character wildcard to replace characters anywhere in a word.

  Example

  behav* will find behave, behavior, behaviour, behavioural, behaviourism, etc.

• The asterisk replaces 0 or more characters, so it can be used to find any number, or to indicate a character that may or may not be present.

  Example	h*emoglobin will find both hemoglobin and haemoglobin.
  	It would also find hemidemiphosphorylmontotremoglobin, if the word is used within a document.

Search For Phrases

You can search for phrases in two ways depending on how exact a match you want to find. You can find an exact phrase or a loose or approximate phrase.

To search for an exact phrase:

To find documents that contain an exact phrase, including any stop words, spaces and punctuation, enclose the phrase in brackets: {oyster toadfish}.

• Example

  If you enter {oyster toadfish}, the search finds only those documents that contain that exact phrase. In contrast, if you enter oyster toadfish, your search interprets that as "oyster AND toadfish" and finds documents containing both terms appearing separately or together.

Notes:

• Special characters are included in the search.

  Example

  Searching for {heart-attack} or {heart attack} returns different results because the "-" is considered in the search.

• Wildcards are searched as characters.

  Example

  Searching for {health care?} returns results such as: Who pays for health care?.

To search for a loose or approximate phrase:

To find documents where your search terms appear adjacent to each other enclose the terms in double quotes: "cell behaviour".

When you use double quotes:

• AND is not automatically inserted between terms.

  Example

  Entering "heart attack" returns different results than heart attack because the latter would be searched as heart AND attack, which would find documents that contained both words, even if they were far apart from each other. The search "heart attack" only finds documents where heart and attack are adjacent to each other.

• Punctuation is ignored.

  Example

  Entering "heart-attack" or "heart attack" would return the same results, because the "-" is ignored.

• Wildcards are searched as wildcards.

  Example

  Searching for "criminal* insan*" would find criminally insane and criminal insanity.

• Plurals are included.

  Example

  Searching "heart attack" would find heart attack and heart attacks.

• Double quotes can also be used to search specifically for stop words, special characters, or punctuation marks, which would otherwise be ignored. To search for the double quote character itself, place a backslash before it and enclose those two characters in double quotes:

  Example

  Searching "\"" finds "

Find Accented And Special Characters

You can search for accented characters either with or without the accent. The results will also contain both variants.

This also applies to special characters.

• Special characters which have common equivalents like π r² - pr2.

• Special characters with no common equivalents, punctuation and spacing are ignored.

• To search specifically for a special character or a punctuation mark, enclose it in double quotes "π".

Stop Words Are Ignored

Stop words are common, frequently used words. While they may add clarity within the text, they do not add significant distinction to a search request. These words will not be included in your search unless you enclose them in brackets or double quotation marks. Stop words include:

• Personal pronouns (such as he, she, we, they).

• Most articles (such as the, an).

• Most forms of the verb, to be (such as be, is, was).

• Some conjunctions (such as as, because, if, when).

Limit The Fields You Search

Not all documents contain all possible fields. This may prevent some articles from appearing in your search results.

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