Scopus, an Elsevier database that the MSK Library subscribes to, differs from PubMed in some significant ways. Here are the key differences to keep in mind when you are selecting the best tool to use for your next research project:

• Scopus includes Cited References, in fact they recently reached a project milestone of 5M cited references added. Cited references are essentially the references in an indexed article’s bibliography, which – if included in a database’s citations records, allow for searchers to see which other articles have cited a particular article since its publication. Note: PubMed records do not include cited references; however, PubMed has begun displaying links to cited references pulled from full-text articles included in PubMed Central (PMC).

• Scopus includes more than just articles, also indexing books, book chapters, and conference abstracts.

• Scopus includes journal titles that go beyond the strictly biomedical disciplines, including content from journal titles in the Health Sciences and Life Sciences, but also from the Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.

• Scopus includes the records from the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases, among other included sources.  As such, Scopus has more than double the number of records in PubMed, with 54M+ records in Scopus compared to PubMed’s 24M+ records.

• Scopus is a type of “federated search interface”, as it allows searchers to use a common/standardized search form to query the content found across its various included sources. That means that any database-specific functionality, for example the native PubMed search interface’s ability to “map” to relevant medical subject headings (MeSH) is not available when using the Scopus interface, nor is the ability to limit a search to the content of a single source database that is included within Scopus.

To learn more about Scopus, PubMed or any other research database available via the MSK Library, please feel free to contact us!