Tip #73: Is Scopus a Narcissist?

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Picture this. You've just finished translating a complex search strategy into Scopus for an evidence synthesis (and just in the nick of time! Your eyes are going googly from staring at your screen all day, your coffee is dangerously low, and your researchers are practically knocking down your office door to get their hands on your search documentation). As a final test, you run the search in Scopus and do a quick skim of the results. Scopus has helpfully highlighted your keywords in yellow within the abstract of each result. As you look through the results, however, your heart sinks, and the world seems to spin. In a number of the abstracts, the term "Scopus" is in blazing yellow.

You may be thinking to yourself, "What on earth? The term 'Scopus' isn't in any of my search hedges! Is one of my terms mapping to the term 'Scopus'???" At least, this was my thinking when I found myself in this nightmarish situation.

The answer is no. Let your heart rest easy, dear colleague. The reason "Scopus" is being highlighted in the abstracts of your search results is simple and ultimately harmless: Scopus is a narcissist.

After running various tests in Scopus, it appears the database automatically highlights instances of "Scopus" being mentioned in the abstracts of records, so long as you are searching for at least one of your terms in the abstract field of a record. This happens regardless of which keywords you search for in the abstract.

For example, I used the following search in Scopus:

AU-ID("Wilson, Paije" 57226313964) AND TITLE-ABS(review)

As you can see, instances of both "Scopus" and "review" are highlighted in yellow in the abstract (note that this also occurs even when you use curly brackets around your terms to search for them as exact matches): 

Scopus results page. Instances of "Scopus" and "review" are highlighted in yellow by Scopus.

However, this highlighting only occurs if you're searching for at least one keyword in the abstract field. If I only search in the title field for my keywords, "Scopus" is no longer highlighted:

AU-ID("Wilson, Paije" 57226313964) AND TITLE(review)

Scopus results page. No terms are highlighted in the abstract.

The highlighting occurs even in cases where your keywords don't appear in the abstract. It only matters that you're searching for at least one keyword in the abstract field.

For example, in this search I'm searching for the term "investigating" in the title or abstract fields. Even though the term is only in the title, it still highlights instances of "Scopus" in the abstract.

AU-ID("Wilson, Paije" 57226313964) AND TITLE-ABS(investigating)

Result in Scopus. Only "Scopus" is highlighted in the abstract.

Thankfully, this little quirk doesn't appear to impact the results of a search.

Scopus, next time you would like give yourself an ego boost, give us a heads up, first! 

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