Tip #69 Scopus Brackets for Acronyms
The Crux: i n Scopus, enclose acronyms in curly brackets. In 2022, Kate posted Tip #9 Scopus - Loose vs. Exact Phrases . Essentially, to search for an EXACT phrase in Scopus, you'll need to enclose it in {curly brackets} rather than "double quotation marks." In Tip #67 Subject Areas in Scopus May Amplify the Noise in Your Search , I wrote about a discovery I made in Scopus when searching the acronym DBS, signifying deep brain stimulation . I was getting substantially more results in non-medical subject areas than medical and was curious to know what DBS meant in non-medical areas. As I scanned resulting abstracts, I was surprised to discover that most records included db in the abstract. It appeared that Scopus was treating DBS as the plural of db, which is the abbreviation for decibel, and returning results with both db and dbs. I confirmed this by testing that the search strings ABS (DBS) and ABS (db) returned the same number of records. It's inte...