Scopus Search Tutorial for Literature Reviews

Scopus is Elsevier's flagship abstract and citation database and, together with Web of Science, is one of the two great multidisciplinary indexes used for literature and systematic reviews. This tutorial covers Scopus syntax, field codes, proximity operators, filters, and export so that you can search it rigorously and reproducibly.

About Scopus

Scopus was launched by Elsevier in 2004 and today indexes more than 27,000 active serial titles from over 7,000 publishers, spanning the sciences, social sciences, health sciences, arts and humanities. Its records include peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers (especially strong in computing and engineering), book chapters, trade publications, and preprints from selected servers.

Scopus's strengths for reviewers include:

• Breadth. Multidisciplinary coverage makes it ideal for topics that span health, social sciences, education, engineering, or business.
• Citation analytics. Every record is linked to its citing documents, references, and related documents. You can trace how a concept has propagated forward and backward through the literature.
• Author and affiliation disambiguation. Scopus Author IDs and Affiliation IDs make it practical to track a researcher's full output, which is particularly useful in citation network analysis and scoping reviews.
• Metrics. CiteScore, SJR, and SNIP journal metrics are surfaced directly in the interface.

Compared with PubMed, Scopus is broader but shallower on biomedical depth, and — critically — it has no controlled vocabulary. Compared with CINAHL, it offers much wider disciplinary coverage but less specificity for nursing and allied health.

Getting started

Scopus is a subscription database. Access is almost always routed through an academic or corporate library: sign in through your institution's proxy or OpenAthens credentials at scopus.com. There is no free public version. If you are not affiliated with a subscribing institution, Scopus's free scopus.com/sources page still exposes title-level coverage and metrics, but not the underlying records.

Once inside, the default landing page is the Documents search form. You will see:

• A search box with a field-scope dropdown (default: Article title, Abstract, Keywords)
• A date range selector
• Document type and subject area limiters
• An Add search field button to build multi-field queries visually

The Advanced search tab (top of the page) is where serious review work happens. It accepts a single free-form query using Scopus's field codes and Boolean syntax, which is the most reproducible way to document your search. You can also access your Search history from the Advanced page and combine numbered searches with AND / OR.

Create a personal Scopus account (separate from institutional login) to save searches, set up citation alerts, and export search histories with your review protocol.

Building your search

Scopus supports Boolean operators AND, OR, AND NOT in uppercase, with parentheses for precedence. Unlike PubMed, Scopus also supports true proximity operators:

• W/n — within n words, any order (e.g., nurse W/3 burnout matches nurse burnout, burnout in nurses, etc.)
• PRE/n — preceded by, ordered (e.g., telehealth PRE/2 intervention)

Phrase searching in Scopus has two flavors:

• "loose phrase" — straight double quotes treat punctuation and stopwords loosely and allow single-character wildcards
• {exact phrase} — curly braces match the phrase literally, character for character

Truncation and wildcards use * for zero or more characters and ? for a single character:

• behav* matches behavior, behaviour, behavioral
• wom?n matches woman and women

Field codes follow the pattern FIELDCODE ( term ). The most useful for reviewers are:

• TITLE-ABS-KEY ( ... ) — title, abstract, and author/indexed keywords
• TITLE ( ... ) — title only
• ABS ( ... ) — abstract only
• KEY ( ... ) — author keywords and indexed terms
• AUTHKEY ( ... ) — author-supplied keywords only
• AUTH ( ... ) — author
• AFFIL ( ... ) — affiliation
• DOCTYPE ( ar ) — document type (ar = article, re = review, cp = conference paper)
• PUBYEAR > 2014 AND PUBYEAR < 2026 — publication year range
• LANGUAGE ( english ) — language filter

Using controlled vocabulary

Scopus does not have a controlled vocabulary. This is a fundamental difference from PubMed's MeSH or CINAHL Subject Headings, and it has practical consequences for your search.

Because there is no indexing thesaurus, you must:

1. Brainstorm synonyms exhaustively. For every concept block, list British and American spellings, abbreviations, brand names, generics, and common author shorthand. Combine them with OR inside TITLE-ABS-KEY.
2. Use truncation aggressively. child* is preferable to listing child, children, childhood individually.
3. Mine author keywords. Scopus exposes AUTHKEY separately from KEY. Scanning the author keywords of five or six on-target papers is the fastest way to surface synonyms you had not anticipated.

The trade-off is that Scopus searches rely entirely on the words authors chose to use, so recent terminology drift (e.g., transgender vs gender-diverse) or discipline-specific jargon can bury relevant records. The mitigation is a longer OR list and a broader TITLE-ABS-KEY scope.

Example search strings

Filters and limits

After running a search, the Refine results panel on the left offers post-hoc filters. Use them to explore a result set, but fold durable constraints into the query string itself (e.g., PUBYEAR, DOCTYPE, LANGUAGE) for reproducibility. Available filters include:

• Year — single years or ranges
• Subject area — 27 top-level domains (e.g., Medicine, Nursing, Psychology, Social Sciences, Engineering)
• Document type — Article, Review, Conference Paper, Book Chapter, Editorial, Letter, Note, Short Survey
• Source title — limit to specific journals
• Keyword — filter by indexed and author keywords
• Affiliation, Author, Country/territory, Funding sponsor
• Open Access — Gold, Hybrid Gold, Bronze, Green

Scopus does not filter by population characteristics (age, sex, species) the way PubMed does, because those are not indexed fields. If you need those constraints, build them into your concept blocks using keywords.

Exporting results to reference managers

From a results page, tick the checkbox in the header to select all records on the current page (or expand to all results, up to 20,000 per export), then click Export. Scopus offers:

• RIS — universal format for EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, RefWorks
• BibTeX — for LaTeX / Overleaf workflows
• CSV and Plain text — for spreadsheet-based screening or manuscript logs

Choose the export fields carefully: at minimum include Citation information, Bibliographical information, Abstract & keywords, and Funding details if you are screening on funder type. For citation network analysis, also include References.

Typical reference-manager workflows:

• EndNote: Export as RIS, then File > Import > File in EndNote (filter: Reference Manager (RIS))
• Zotero: Drag the downloaded .ris file onto the Zotero collection, or use the Zotero Connector directly from the results page
• Mendeley: Use Add new > Import library > RIS

Tips and pitfalls

• Do not forget parentheses. Because Scopus queries can get long, unparenthesized OR groups are the single most common cause of silently wrong result counts.
• Prefer TITLE-ABS-KEY over ALL. The ALL field includes references, which inflates recall with noise — full-text matches in bibliographies are rarely relevant to your actual topic.
• Use proximity (W/n) for concept pairs. It is often tighter than AND and broader than an exact phrase — a good sweet spot for clinical concepts that typically co-occur.
• Mine author keywords early. Run a pilot search, open five high-relevance records, and harvest their AUTHKEY list to expand your synonym rings.
• Cross-check against a subject-specific database. Scopus's breadth is its strength and its weakness. For biomedical topics pair it with PubMed; for nursing pair it with CINAHL; and before finalizing, revisit your search strategy documentation.