Scopus guide

Refine results

Peer reviewed is not available, because in Scopus all journals (Source type: Journal) are peer reviewed.

Restrictions can Limit to or Exclude.

Subject area

• The publications are divided into 27 thematic areas.
• The subject area delineation is rough; for example, the Social Sciences subject area includes: Archeology, Education, Geography, Library and Information Sciences, Linguistics and Language, Sociology and Political Science, Anthropology, Communication.
• The same publication may belong to several subject areas, multidisciplinary journals belong to all.
• You can see which topics belong to each of those 27 topics in the Enter subject area menu in the Sources search.
• The limiting does not reach the article level.
• For a more detailed definition of topics, use Advanced search.

Document type

• Article = research articles.
• Review = review articles.

Source type

• Journal = peer reviewed journals.
• Trade journal = professional journals, usually non-peer-reviewed.

Affiliation & Country/territory

• Affiliation = writers' organizations, e.g. the universities where the research was conducted.
• Country = countries where affiliates are located. Not related to the topics of the publications or the target countries of the study.

Sort on

Relevance

• The frequency of keyword matches.
• The rarity of keywords.
• The presence of keywords in the title, keywords, summary, especially so that all keywords are in the same field.
• The first appearance of keywords at the beginning of the document.
• The presence of keywords in close proximity.

Terms retrieved with a truncation mark are not taken into account in relevance sorting. If your search contains words with and without truncated marks, words without truncation marks will rise in relevance sorting. "Terms with a wildcard cannot contribute to the ranking because it is not a single term, but a set of possibilities." 

Cited by

Cited by shows the number of times a document has been cited by other documents in Scopus.