Today, I’m going to blog about Scopus to follow up on my last post on Web of Science and Cited Reference Search.  Scopus is not as complicated as WoS as it is just one database with its own interface.  Originally, Scopus data only went back to 1996, but they are in the process of adding records going back to 1970 and should be done in a year or two.

Just like in WoS, the simplest way to find in Scopus where/wheter an article has been cited is to search for the article and look on the left side to see how many times it has been cited.  If you hover ofter the entry, you can get more citation information.

Scopus cited referenceBut Scopus has to deal with incorrect citations just like WoS does so how does one find them?  In this case, under the View secondary documents link.  When we click on this link, we can see other entries that fit your search criteria but that don’t have their own full entries in Scopus.  Most of these secondary documents come from the references lists of documents that do have their full entries in Scopus.

Scopus secondary documents

When we look at the secondary documents, we find one of the some entries from WoS and that article title has been truncated.  We also find the same reference that we dismissed in WoS as not being the same paper we were looking for: it turns out that it has the same title, authors, and journal but both the year, volume, issue, and page number are wrong. [I know these authors and they hadn’t met each other yet in 1987.]  There are also two entries for a conference presentation with a similar name.  Overall, Scopus found more references citing the original article than WoS using the simple search strategy.  The simple search strategy even found one of the errant WoS entry (the one with the mistyped page number)–probably because Scopus does have a fair number of people who review records by hand.

Scopus secondary documents

So, no database is error free, but using the simple cited reference search in either Web of Science or Scopus is likely to give you what you need.