You may need to refine your search if you have a large number of results and not many of them look relevant to your topic, or if you are getting very few results, or none at all. Below are some tips for refining your search.
Scopus offers a number of options for making your search more specific:
Try changing the way a large set of results is displayed from Date (newest) to:
| Relevance | to promote those references whose terminology most closely matches your search terms |
| Cited by (highest) | finds those references which have been most frequently read and cited (these will be older references) |
Try searching for the most important search term in Article Title only, or search for background terms in Abstract only.
You can use what is called a proximity operator to find only records where words are in close proximity.
Scopus has two proximity operators:
Any of the terms neck, spine or spinal must occur within 3 words of manipulate, manipulation.
This will find both spinal manipulation, and manipulation of the spine.
Any of the terms neck, spine or spinal must occur within 3 words of and following manipulate, manipulation.
This will find manipulation of the neck and manipulation of the spine, but not spinal manipulation.
You can focus your results by using the Search within results... box at the top of the left-hand sidebar.
This works best with a single word or phrase, but you can also specify that your term should appear in the Title only.
Refine your results by e.g. language or type, choose these limits from the left-hand sidebar.
For example:
Make your search broader by:
Try including a wider range of search terms:
