Generating a Citation Overview in Scopus: 5 Easy Steps

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Using Scopus to analyze an overview of a set of citations is useful for viewing the citation trend for a set of documents, finding all publications citing a specific document (or set of documents), and discovering the overall impact of publications in a research area of interest. These 5 easy steps will help you to create a citation overview in just minutes:

  1. After running a Scopus search narrow down your results the best you can, ideally to less than 2,000 records.
  2. Select what you want included in your analysis. You can choose to include specific documents, or include all results from a given page (‘Select page‘) or  the entire results list (‘Select all‘). Once you’ve made your selections, click the ‘View Citation Overview’ link.
  3. The Citation Overview tool will display the citation information for each document you selected from your results list. Citations from the current year, along with the 4 preceding years, are automatically included in the table. If desired, you can adjust which years to display.
  4. You can also further modify the table by choosing whether to exclude self-citations or citations from books, in addition to specifying how you want documents sorted.
  5. Now you can begin studying the information and continue manipulating the chart to help pinpoint key research you want to investigate further, or use the information to identify trends in a particular research area.

Ask us if you would like further assistance with analyzing citation trends in your area of interest or research focus. You can also watch the pre-recorded webcast from Elsevier on using Scopus’ analysis tools (33 minutes).

So You Want to Publish a Research Paper: Reflections on Predatory Publishers

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I recently read with interest a blog post by Christopher Morley, PhD, published in STFM (Society of Teachers of Family Medicine) that really struck a chord with me.  In his post, he lists ten steps to help spot a publisher that an author should definitely not engage with.

Predatory or deceptive publishers continue to plague the scholarly communication landscape, with some publishers truly behaving like wolves in sheep’s clothing. This is not the first time I blog about this topic, as awareness into this dubious practice is vital for all of us who provide access to scholarly research journals. The most important thing we can do for researchers, whether they are just starting their publishing careers or are seasoned authors, is to highlight this issue and make them aware of unscrupulous publishers. Below is a summary of Dr. Morley’s ten steps which researchers can use as a checklist, whether they receive an email solicitation or if they are searching for a possible place to publish.  You can read his full post here. Continue reading →