Measuring Research Impact: Using Scopus to evaluate universities

Using Scopus, you can:

• Search for publications of an institution and view the publishing output, collaboration affiliations for these publications.
• Compare the publication activity of various institutions in a particular subject area.

This page shows you the steps to get the above information from Scopus.

1. Access Scopus.

2. Perform i) a Document Search or ii) an Affiliation Search.

i) Document Search -

Under "Document Search", enter the name of your desired institution in the "Affiliation Name" field. For example: City University of Hong Kong. 

A list of documents by this institution is then displayed.

ii) Affiliation Search -

Under "Affiliation Search", enter the name of your desired institution.

Select your institution from the result list. An institution page opens to show the publishing activity of the institution and collaboration affiliations for these publications. This page also shows the institution's publications according to subject areas.

If you click on the number of documents, a list of documents by this institution will be displayed.

3. If needed, further refine your search results by year, subject area, or document type, etc.

4. To create the Citation Overview to track how often publications of your desired institution are cited, select the documents you want and click "Create citation overview".

The Citation Overview below, for example, shows how often CityU's publications in 2003 are cited. For details about Scopus's Citation Overview and the h-index, refer to the "Impact of Authors" page.

5. If you select more documents than Scopus can process in the web interface, the Citation Tracker page opens to ask you for an e-mail address so that a Citation Tracker in CSV format can be generated for you. Note that the Citation Tracker only holds a maximum of 20,000 documents. If you select more than this number, only the first 20,000 documents will be processed. Below is an example of a downloaded Citation Tracker in CSV format.

1. Access Scopus.

2. Perform a Document Search. Enter the keyword(s) in the "Article Title, Abstract, Keywords" field to search for documents on your desired subject.

3. From the results page, select "Analyze results".

4. Click on "Affiliation name". This page shows you the total number of documents by Affiliation name.