CITATION METRICS WORKSHOP – ADVANCED SEARCHING & TECHNIQUES FOR SCOPUS
Prepared by Bibliometric Team, NUS Libraries. April 2016.
Search Techniques for Non-Indexed Works in Scopus
Steps
Technique
Page
1 - 10
Advanced Citation Searching of Non-Indexed Works
(Searching of Reference List of Citing Articles)
11 - 15
Searching for Citations to a Name Variant
5
16 - 20
Searching for Citations to a Specific Work
6-7
21
Obtaining Total Citation Count for both Indexed and Non-Indexed Works
1-4
7
Scopus – Advanced Citation Searching of Non-Indexed Works (Searching of Reference List of Citing Articles)
1. Under the Document Search tab, enter “yeoh b” in the Search for: field and select Authors in the dropdown list.
If necessary, click the Add search field link to include another line of search parameters.
Note: using the quotation marks “ ” is to restrict the search to results where there is an author name with the
phrase Yeoh, B.
2. Select the starting year when the author first published in the Date Range (e.g. 1990). Click the magnifier button
to search.
Hint: The Subject Areas cannot be limited as References are not indexed with a subject term.
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3. Click on View secondary documents.
Secondary documents are extracted from the reference list of documents. Secondary documents are not found in
the Scopus databases. These documents could be:

an article published in a journal that is not indexed in Scopus.

a book, a thesis, patent or another type of publication that is not indexed in Scopus

a reference that contains incorrect or missing information and therefore cannot be linked to a Full Record in
Scopus database. It is most likely a variation of another cited reference that is linked to a Full Record.
4. At the left panel, mouse over the Author Name section and click on View more.
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5. By default, author names are sorted by number of results (descending order). Click on the Sort on dropdown list
and select “Y” from the list.
6. Click the checkboxes next to YEOH, B.-S.; YEOH, B.S.A.; Yeoh, B.; Yeoh, B.S.; and Yeoh, B.S.A. to gather all the
possible name variants. Click on Limit to.
7. Select all results and click on CSV export.
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8. If you wish to export documents in other formats, click on the down arrow button next to the CSV export. Select
the format (e.g. CSV Excel) in the list. Click the Export button.
9. Save the file. This will save a list of documents by the author in an Excel compatible format.
10. Open the saved file in Excel, sort the list by title, review the list of records and delete the ones not written by the
author, but were retrieved. Sum the Cited by column for the remaining records.
To further reduce the results set, additional limits may be applied for Source Title and Year, followed by clicking on
Limit.
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Scopus –Searching for Citations to a Name Variant
11. Due to the inconsistencies in publishing, it may be necessary to determine citations to individual works using a
name variant.
E.g. Journal article
Ang TP, Wee TSA, Chin WS
Three-dimensional self-assembled monolayer (3D SAM) of n-alkanethiols on copper nanoclusters
JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY B 108 (30): 11001-11010 JUL 29 2004
12. Under the Document Search tab, enter “wee t s a” in the Search for: field and select Authors from the
dropdown list. Click the Add search field link.
13. Enter chem and select References from the dropdown list. Click the magnifier button to search.
14. The Scopus record of this article is displayed. Click on View secondary documents.
15. This retrieves 3 results with 1 citation each, arising from incorrect information used during referencing.
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Scopus –Searching for Citations to a Specific Work
16. As there are limitations to the Refine Results function, it may be necessary to determine citations by looking at
individual works.
E.g. Book
Singapore: A Developmental City State / by Martin Perry, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh. New
York : Wiley, 1997.
17. Under the Document search tab, enter “yeoh b” in the Search for: field and select Authors from the dropdown
list. Click the Add Search field link.
18. Enter “Singapore a developmental city state” and select References from the dropdown list. Click the magnifier
button to search.
19. A list of records is displayed. Click on View secondary documents.
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20. Examine the Source Title and there are four records with a total of 159 citations that match the author’s book.
Scopus – Obtaining Total Citation Count for both Indexed and Non-Indexed Works
21. To obtain the Total Citation Count, add the citation count obtained from the Basic Author Search (Indexed
Journals)* to the “Cited by” column of the Excel file obtained in Step 10 (Non-Indexed Publications for various
name variants).
* The steps are contained in the document, Citation Metrics Workshop – Basic Searching and Techniques for
Scopus.
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