Search health databases

Learn how to use the major health databases to find the best available evidence for your research

Scopus
Scopus is a core multidisciplinary database, the largest abstracts database of peer-reviewed literature including journals, books and conference proceedings. It also offers citation analysis/bibliometrics for authors and articles. Coverage mostly from 1960.

The interactive exercise below demonstrates how to access Scopus, search for documents, use the filters, sort search results, and access articles.

Scopus videos

Scopus Searching Made Easy
How to search Scopus without getting a headache (3:02 mins).
Scopus - selecting and saving references
This video shows you how to select and save references from your Scopus search results list. (6:20)
Scopus Citation Searching - from one article to many
This video shows you how to use a single reference to find hundreds of articles using citation searching in Scopus. (5:51 mins)

Additional resources

Scopus Basics
This quick reference guide demonstrates how to search in Scopus using phrase searching, truncation and synonyms; navigate search results; refine search results and check full text options
Scopus Citation Searching
Citation searching, using one article to find other similar ones, is also known as 'snowballing' or 'pearling'. This quick reference guide explains the concepts of forward and backward citation chaining, and demonstrates how to view the references of articles (backwards citation chaining or searching), and view 'cited by' articles (forwards citation chaining or searching).
How to turn off smart (curly) quotes in Word
Pasting search strategies from Word into Scopus will cause problems if your Word document uses curly quotation marks. Follow these instructions to turn off curly quotes.