Tip #69 Scopus Brackets for Acronyms

The Crux: in 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 interesting that when I typed DBS in ALL CAPS, Scopus converted it to small characters. And when I typed in db in small characters, Scopus translated it to ALL CAPS.

Searches of DBS and db with and without curly brackets

The fix was easy. As with exact phrases, I needed to force an exact rendering of the acronym by employing curly brackets. The search ABS ({DBS}) resulted in over 75% of records from biomedical subject categories. Since dbs, plural abbreviation for decibel, might still appear in medical abstracts related to hearing, operationalizing DBS would add precision. By operationalizing, I simply mean using Boolean AND or a proximity operator to require another term be present with or in proximity to DBS. For example ABS (({DBS}) AND brain) operationalizes the term DBS to require the term brain also be present in the abstract, which weeds out many irrelevant records. It's not perfect, but it will help. 

Results of search string ABS (({DBS}) AND brain) by subject area

Incidentally, I contacted Scopus via chat, about the db/DBS conundrum which occasioned me asking "are you AI or human," lol, what a world. The human assistant did not have a solution and when I suggested that surely I was not the first person to search for an acronym that ended in the letter "s", they said they'd never before dealt with this question and would research it and get back to me. Five days later, I received a response from Scopus instructing exactly what I had already done - enclose the acronym in curly brackets.

Also incidentally, something else happened with DBS. My naming convention for an EndNote library is Lastname.topic. Thus the file name from this search was Oesterle.DBS. Well, it turns out that DBS is also a file extension. Thus, when I named the library, it was not saved as .enl but rather .dbs, which I did not notice at the time. Fortunately, right before closing the file, I realized the file icon and extension were wrong. At that point I compressed the file and made a new library. Had I closed the library, I would not have been able to open it as .dbs is not a file format supported by any of my applications. 

So, consider using curly brackets around acronyms when searching Scopus and be careful of three-letter acronyms in filenames lest they unwittingly become file extensions.

That's all I've got.