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Scopus in Detail: Facts & Figures

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.

Updated daily, Scopus offers:

  • Over 16,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 international publishers
    - including 1200 open access journals
  • 520 conference proceedings
  • 650 trade publications
  • 315 book series
  • 36 million records, of which:
    - 18 million records include references going back to 1996 (75% include references)
    - 18 million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1823.

Scopus also offers full integration of the scientific web in its search results, with:

  • 431 million scientific web pages
  • 23 million patents from 5 patent offices (US Patent and Trademark Office, European Patent Office, Japan Patent Office, World Intellectual Property Organization and UK Intellectual Property Office)
  • "Articles-in-Press" from over 3,000 journals
  • Over 80 selected sources e.g. institutional repositories, digital archives and special subject collections made individually searchable via Selected Sources tab.

Content coverage:

  • Broadest coverage available of Scientific, Technical, Medical and Social Sciences literature
  • Worldwide coverage; more than half of Scopus content originates from Europe, Latin America and the Asia Pacific region
  • References go back to 1996. 70% of all Scopus records, back to 1823, have an abstract
  • Scopus also includes the historical material published by American Chemical Society, the Springer / Kluwer archive, Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, American Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry and the journals Nature and Science. Scopus has loaded the archives of Elsevier (back to 1823) and the journals Science (back to 1880) and Nature (back to 1869)
  • Over 57 million additional cited references that are not covered by Scopus as such (e.g. books)
    - “Articles-in-Press” from over 3,000 journals. These articles are available in Scopus prior to their official publication date, from Elsevier, Springer / Kluwer, Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The AIP articles from BioMed Central will be available shortly
  • 100% coverage of Medline
  • Coverage is over 99% complete as of 1996 - on issue level.

For a complete overview of all titles in Scopus click here.


Scopus, designed by users for users, improves research productivity and effectiveness by offering, among other features:

  • A simple and intuitive interface to quickly refine your results
  • Seamless linking to full-text articles and other library
    resources
  • Alerts, RSS and HTML feeds to stay up-to-date on new
    articles matching your search query
  • Instant display of the abstract on result pages allowing for aquick ‘relevance’ check
  • Scopus Author Identifier to distinguish between results
    from authors with the same name and to capture all results for an author whose name is recorded in different ways
  • Scopus Affiliation Identifier to automatically identify and
    match an organization with all its research output
  • Scopus Citation Tracker to simply find, check and track
    citation data year by year and in real-time
  • The h-index as a means to evaluate research performance, complemented by unique graphs
  • PatentCites to track how primary research is practically
    applied in patents
  • WebCites to track the influence of peer-reviewed research on web literature
  • Document Download Manager to easily download and
    organize multiple full-text articles simultaneously
  • A sophisticated level of interoperability for joint users of
    RefWorks, the web-based bibliographic management tool and of Elsevier MDL’s CrossFire Beilstein, bridging the gap between text and structure searching
  • An extra 4,500 titles in Social Sciences and Arts &
    Humanities records in Scopus for joint users of Scopus
    and ProQuest’s CSA Illumina
  • Full integration with 2collab – the free collaborative
    research tool from Elsevier to network, collaborate and
    share scholarly information with peers and colleagues.

For an update on the latest features and enhancements in Scopus, click here.