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How to Create Scopus™ Alerts
Do you need to receive automatic alerts on a specific topic or author? The Scopus™ database has an alert service and includes scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences literature from more than 14,000 peer-reviewed journals. It is large, interdisciplinary, and includes cited references for articles published after 1995.
Scopus Alert Types
Four types of alerts can be created in Scopus:
- Subject,
- Table of Contents,
- Author, and
- Citation Alerts (tracks new citations to a particular article).
With these Alerts, you can stay current on a particular topic, browse a journal’s latest issue, see the latest publications of a particular author, or identify new articles that cite a particular article.
Steps to Creating Scopus Alerts
- Develop your search strategy.
- Click Alert Me from the Document Display page. The Add a Document Citation Alert page will display.
- Choose a name for your alert and enter it in the Name of Alert field.
- Enter in the E-mail Address field the e-mail address to which you want your alerts to be sent.
- Select how often you wish to receive the Alert: Daily, Weekly, Monthly from the Frequency List. You can also select Inactive for times you do not wish to receive alerts.
- Select either HTML or Text Format from the E-mail Format section.
- Click Submit to save the Document Citation Alert or click Cancel to discontinue creating the Document.
Differences between Scopus and MEDLINE/PubMed
Scopus has a much broader scope, including the 5,000 plus journals in MEDLINE®/ PubMed® as well as more than 9,000 journal titles from other disciplines. This can be good or not so good depending on your situation. There is an advantage to getting articles from many different disciplines, but it is common to get more results that are non-relevant in Scopus. For subject-based alerts, Scopus works best with very specific, non-ambiguous topics. For authors, it is more effective than MEDLINE/PubMed because Scopus will find your author’s works in journals not indexed in MEDLINE.
Scopus includes cited references for articles published after 1995. This allows searching to identify subjects or authors for your citation alert from 1995 forward in time.
Scopus does not include a single subject vocabulary (thesaurus) such as Medical Subject Headings® (MeSH®) in MEDLINE. It is, therefore, more challenging to construct an authoritative search in Scopus. It is advisable to try various synonyms of terms and/or consult with a librarian to develop the most effective and efficient search strategy for a subject-based alert.
To access Scopus, mouse-over Research Tools on the green menu bar of the NIH Library website and click on Databases from the drop-down options. Scopus is listed alphabetically, near the bottom of the page.
For more information about using Scopus, call the Information Desk at 301-496-1080; or email your Informationist.
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