Scopus: A New Multi-disciplinary Article Database
UNB Libraries has added a new database called Scopus, which you can use to find articles in peer reviewed scientific, medical and technical journals. There is some coverage in the social sciences also. Scopus is quite easy to use, and you may find it a useful supplement to specialized databases such as CINAHL, PSYCInfo, Medline etc.,
particularly if you are looking for information on a topic that crosses disciplinary lines. As in our other databases, the LinkSource link resolver has been enabled, so you should be able to link directly to articles in e-journals to which UNB subscribes. To use Scopus, go to the UNB Libraries website at http://www.lib.unb.ca and choose Scopus from the Indexes and Abstracts list under the e-Resources dropdown menu at the top of the page.
When searching Scopus, you should keep in mind that it has certain limitations:
• Unlike CINAHL and most of our other specialized databases, coverage only goes back to the mid-90s.
• Scopus does not claim to cover any field of study in a comprehensive way. It is essentially a way of getting access to information about articles published in a number of large electronic journal collections.
• Scopus does not use any standardized search terms. Therefore you must use keyword searching, and try to think of all the possible synonyms to the terms you are searching. For example, if you were looking for articles about Pet Therapy and you entered “pet therapy” in the search box you would retrieve 84 items. A search using the synonym “animal assisted therapy” yields 85. Combining the two terms using “or” retrieves a total of 162 items, which indicates that most writers use one term or the other but not both. In CINAHL, on the other hand, either term entered into the search box would automatically map to the preferred term Pet Therapy, and you could retrieve all the references on that subject with one search.
A valuable additional component of Scopus is Scirus, an award-winning Web search engine that provides a single point of access to the scientific Web -- over 160 million pages and documents from websites relevant to research and education, including university sites, author homepages, digital libraries and archives, institutional repositories, preprint servers, and patents.