Document types
Scopus coverage focuses on primary document types from serial publications. Primary means that the author is identical to
the researcher in charge of the presented findings. Scopus does not include secondary document types, where the author is
not identical to the person behind the presented research, such as obituaries and book reviews (see section 2.2).
Scopus currently has over 60 million core records:
• Over 38 million records back to 1996 of which 84% include references
• Over 22 million records pre-1996 which go back as far as 1823 (abstracts included where available,
but references are not included)
• Approximately 3 million new records are added each year (5,500/day)
As of December 2015, Scopus has added over 93 million pre-1996 cited references to over 5 million articles. This has been
achieved in two ways: (1) by adding pre-1996 cited references to existing articles, and (2) by adding article back files, including
their cited references, from the archives of 36 major publishers going back to 1970. These major publishers include: Springer,
Wiley Blackwell, IEEE, American Physical Science and Elsevier. By the end of 2016, approximately 12 million articles will have
gone through this process, adding an estimated 240 million pre-1996 cited references.