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Publication Tracking : Searching for an Affiliation in Scopus

Overview

This page gives tips on how to search for an affiliation in Scopus, including the use of Affiliation Profiles and the Document Search. Click here to access this information as a downloadable PDF

Click here to access a PDF containing search templates and examples of searching for affiliations in Scopus.

Affiliation Search

Searching by Affiliation Profile

To find an affiliation profile, click on Scopus' Affiliations tab in the Basic Search.

Screenshot of Scopus' affiliation search, with instructions to click the affiliations tab

Type the affiliation into the search bar, and click the affiliation if it appears in the dropdown. If it does not appear in the dropdown, hit the Enter key, and look for the correct affiliation on the results page.

Screenshot of Scopus' affiliation search, with instructions to 1. begin typing the affiliation name into the searchbar and then 2. click the affiliation if it appears in the resulting dropdown

This will take you to the Affiliation Profile. From here, you can either click "Documents, whole institution" or "Documents, affiliation only." "Documents, whole institution" is broader, and will retrieve publications associated with the institution, as a whole. "Documents, affiliation only" is narrower, and will only retrieve publications associated with the specific affiliation you searched for. Clicking either of these numbers will take you to a results page of all of that affiliation's publications.

Screenshot of affiliation profile in scopus (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Arrows point to the Documents, whole institution and the Documents, affiliation only options, with instructions to "Click numbers to either see documents affiliated with whole institution or documents by only the specified affiliation"

Document Search

1. Search by Affiliation Keywords

In the advanced document search you can search for publications associated with an affiliation by using the AFFIL() field tag.

To access the Advanced Document Search:

1. Click the Documents tab above the Scopus search bar.

Screenshot of Scopus document search, with instructions to click the Documents tab

2. Click "Advanced Document Search" just below the Scopus search bar. This will take you to the advanced document search page, where you can run your search.

Screenshot of Scopus document search, with instructions to click advanced document search

Just like author names, affiliations are subject to name ambiguity. So, for example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison can be listed as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW, UW-Madison, University of Wisconsin, etc. To correct for this, you will want to include name variations in your affiliation search string by using OR, like so:

 

AFFIL(wisconsin OR madison OR UW OR wi OR wisc)

 

2. Search by Affiliation ID

An additional way to limit by affiliation is to use an affiliation ID. Affiliation IDs are assigned to affiliations in Scopus. They can be found within Affiliation Profiles in Scopus (to find an Affiliation Profile, see instructions in the box above). Just like when we searched affiliation keywords, you will want to run the search in the Advanced Document Search in Scopus. Affiliation IDs can be used in place of (fewer results) or can be combined with (more results) your affiliation keyword search. If you wanted to combine the affiliation ID with your current search, you would add it to your affiliation search by using OR, and using the AF-ID() field tag like so:

 

AFFIL(wisconsin OR madison OR UW OR wi OR wisc) OR AF-ID(60032179)

 

3. Limit by Date

Finally, you can also limit your search by date. To do this you would use the PUBDATETXT() field tag and add it to your search using AND. Make sure to include extra parentheses around your affiliation search string, like so:

 

(AFFIL(wisconsin OR madison OR UW OR wi OR wisc) OR AF-ID(60032179)) AND PUBDATETXT("April 2021")

 

What Are Affiliation Profiles and IDs?

Just like authors, affiliations can be given affiliation profiles and affiliation IDs.

Affiliation IDs are unique numbers assigned to affiliations. Affiliation IDs are meant to disambiguate affiliations, as a search of an affiliation's Affiliation ID will retrieve any publications associated with that ID in Scopus.

Each Affiliation ID is associated with an Affiliation Profile, which, among other things, contains the affiliation's Affiliation ID, metrics, and a list of its publications indexed in Scopus.

Just like Scopus IDs and Author Profiles, Affiliation IDs and profiles are automatically generated by an algorithm in Scopus. While this function is helpful, it can be subject to error. For example, single affiliations may have multiple IDs, or affiliations may have incorrect publications assigned to their ID. Depending on how comprehensive you would like your search to be, you may want to consider using affiliation keywords in addition to Affiliation IDs to ensure you do not miss relevant results.

How Do I Interpret These Searches?

Boolean Operators (AND and OR)

OR is used to combine synonyms together. For example, a search of parent OR guardian is going to retrieve publications that have the word parent, the word guardian, or both the words parent and guardian in them.

AND is used to combine concepts together. For example, a search of parent AND guardian is going to retrieve publications that have BOTH the words parent and guardian in them. If a publication has the word parent, and not the word guardian, your search will not retrieve that publication.

 

Visualization of how Boolean works In the example on the left, I’m using OR to combine two synonyms. This is helpful when your are searching for a concept and you want to combine all keywords related to that concept. parent OR guardian retrieves results that either contain the term parent or guardian, or both the terms parent and guardian The example on the right shows what happens when you combine search terms using the Boolean operator AND. Using AND is most effective when combining different concepts. For example, parent AND guardian only retrieves results that contain BOTH the terms parent and guardian. So, in this example, if an article has the term parent but not the term guardian, your search will not retrieve the article. While using AND retrieves less results than using the Boolean Operator OR.

Parentheses ( )

Parentheses are used in much the same way you would use them in a math equation, where OR is an addition symbol and AND is a multiplication symbol. A search of (cat OR feline) AND (dog OR canine) is going to retrieve publications that have both the words cat and dog, or cat and canine, or feline and dog, or feline and canine in them.

Field Tags

These tell Scopus where to search in the article for your terms.

  • AFFIL() searches the affiliation field
  • AF-ID() searches by affiliation ID
  • PUBDATETXT() searches the publication date field (note: when searching by year, use PUBYEAR())

Quotation Marks " "

These tell Scopus to search for two or more words as an intact phrase. So, for example, searching "young adult" is going to search for that intact phrase, whereas searching young adult, without quotation marks, will look for articles that have young and adult anywhere in the article, regardless of how apart those two words might be in the article (e.g., it could retrieve an article that says, "The young polar bear was now an adult").