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Scopus

Secondary documents search

Scopus indexes all references in a paper. References to documents which are available in Scopus are listed with links; others are given in the reference list with a count of their total citations but no links. You can click the citation number to find other works citing this source.

This can be useful if the source you are looking at is not available in Scopus, perhaps because they do not index this type of material. For example, you can use it to find all Scopus papers citing a given preprint.

You can also search for these sources. To do this, carry out a search as normal: E.g. if we are looking for papers that cite the book Great Expectations by Dickens, we might search for "great expectations" in the Source title, and dickens in the Authors field.

Run the search, which will return any normal Scopus items matching it, then click on the Secondary documents tab, which lists references to works not indexed in Scopus.

Screenshot of the Scopus "secondary documents" search

Often there will be multiple versions listed. In this example there are 125 different entries, because there are so many different editions of the book. You can see the citing papers for an individual entry by clicking on the Citations count for that line, or select all items and then View cited by for the full list.

When running your original search, bear in mind that these citations come out of printed reference lists and so may not be very detailed - they may not always have the year of publication or a DOI, for example. In particular, if you are looking for a book, it is possible that some references may have been indexed under 'article title' rather than 'source title' (which is normally used for books) so it can be worth searching for both, or using 'All fields'.