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I realized something strange when searching on Scopus' database.

If I query some words in the field "TITLE-ABS-KEY", I do not get the same results as if I query each field individually, separated by "OR"s.

For example, the query:

TITLE-ABS-KEY ( flood mitigation dam river OR stream )

finds 163 papers.

Whereas the query:

TITLE ( flood mitigation dam river OR stream )
OR ABS ( flood mitigation dam river OR stream )
OR KEY ( flood mitigation dam river OR stream )

finds only 140 papers.

Does anyone know if this is to be expected, and if so, what is the difference between both queries?

sc28
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2 Answers2

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I eventually got a clarification from Elsevier Customer Service, and they provided the following explanation:

"TITLE-ABS-KEY is going to find all results for any or all of those three criteria with the keywords. TITLE OR ABS OR KEY is going to give only results where three criteria don't overlap. So that would give less results."

sc28
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I am not sure, but you could easily check by hand, since you have so few results (make a "difference" between the two results sets and see what's different in those 23 papers that are left).

The TITLE-ABS-KEY search takes the TITLE+ABSTRACT+KEYWORDS fields as whole, making those 3 fields into just one and then running a text search. Thus, if you have a paper that (as an example) has "flood mitigation dam" in its title and river in its keywords, that paper will be returned by the result.

The TITLE() OR ABS() or KEY() searches those 3 fields separately. Thus, the same example paper wouldn't be returned.

Hope this may help you. As said, you can easily check by hand what's going on...

valleymanbs
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  • hey, thanks for posting! my bad, I had gotten in the meantime some answer from customer service, and forgot to update my question here. Now done, see below for the explanation. – sc28 Feb 11 '17 at 21:44