How do I use the Institution Profile Wizard?
Last updated on May 01, 2026
Use the Scopus Institution Profile Wizard (IPW) to request changes to your institution profile:
- Organize the department hierarchy
- Update organization details, preferred name, and other metadata
- Accurately manage the association of published articles with your organization profile
- Create an organization profile
The Institution Profile Wizard is restricted to authorized users selected by the institution. You must have administrative access to manage an Institution Profile.
Access the IPW from the Organization profile page.
The Institution Profile Wizard is restricted to authorized users selected by the institution. You must have administrative access to manage an Institution Profile.
- From an Affiliation details page, select 'Edit institution profile'.
- Review the terms and conditions and tick the box if you agree.
- Select 'Continue'.
Use Modify hierarchy to review, change, and manage the affiliation relationships within an organization structure.
Find, add, and place an affiliation within the structure
- From the Institution profile wizard, select 'Start' from the Modify hierarchy panel to open the Review and modify the hierarchy page.
- Select 'Add affiliation to hierarchy'.
- Enter the name of the desired affiliation and select 'Search'.
- Tick the desired affiliation(s) from the results and select 'Add selected'. The affiliations are added to the Hierarchy work space and are ready to be placed into the hierarchy.
Note:If you add an affiliation that is already included in another institution hierarchy, you are prompted to declare if the affiliation is shared with other organizations or if it should be removed from the other organizations. Providing a URL reference to show the ownership will help the correction team to verify your claim. - Drag and drop the affiliations to place them into their desired location in the hierarchy. Alternatively, select '+' to place the affiliation in the hierarchy, then drag and drop the affiliations to place them into their desired location in the hierarchy.
- Affiliations must be placed into the hierarchy. Unplaced affiliations will not be added and if you leave the page, your changes will be lost.
- Making an affiliation a child of another affiliation (the parent) adjusts the total document count at the parent level.
- If there are no further changes, select 'Review changes and confirm'.
- From the Confirm changes page:
- Review the updates to be applied to your institution
- Review your contact details
- Enter comments regarding your institution hierarchy update
- Select 'Submit'. Your request is submitted to Scopus.
Once submitted, you cannot modify the institution hierarchy until it is processed by Scopus (four to six weeks). You will receive a notification when it is completed.
Note that changes are not immediate and do not appear in Scopus, or within the Institution Profile Wizard, until processing is complete.
- From the Institution profile wizard, select 'Start' from the Modify hierarchy panel to open the Review and modify the hierarchy page.
- Select and hold the dotted handle next to an affiliation in the hierarchy:
- To make the affiliation a child, drag and drop the affiliation below and slightly right of the parent.
- To move the affiliation up or down the structure, drag and drop the affiliation to the desired location.
- If there are no further changes, select 'Review changes and confirm'.
- From the Confirm changes page:
- Review the updates to be applied to your institution
- Review your contact details
- Enter comments regarding your institution hierarchy update
- Select 'Submit'. Your request is submitted to Scopus.
Once submitted, you cannot modify the institution hierarchy until it is processed by Scopus (four to six weeks). You will receive a notification when it is completed.
Note that changes are not immediate and do not appear in Scopus, or within the Institution Profile Wizard, until processing is complete.
Set affiliation dates, copy, or delete affiliations
- Select the desired icon:
- To set start or end dates to an affiliation, select the calendar icon, choose the desired dates and select 'Save date(s)'.
- To remove an affiliation, select the delete icon.
- To add an affiliation that was removed, select the plus icon from the Removed affiliations section.
- If there are no further changes, select 'Review changes and confirm'.
- From the Confirm changes page:
- Review the updates to be applied to your institution
- Review your contact details
- Enter comments regarding your institution hierarchy update
- Select 'Submit'. Your request is submitted to Scopus.
Once submitted, you cannot modify the institution hierarchy until it is processed by Scopus (four to six weeks). You will receive a notification when it is completed.
Note that changes are not immediate and do not appear in Scopus, or within the Institution Profile Wizard, until processing is complete.
Use the Modify profile tool to:
- Edit and manage the preferred and alternative names, addresses, and websites of an institution
- Add/remove alternate names associated with the profile
While modifying a profile, select 'Save draft' to save potential modifications if you are unable to complete the edits in one session. When returning to edit a saved draft, you can choose to use the draft or start again. Choosing to start again deletes the saved draft.
A saved draft may become invalid if there or changes to the profile since the draft was saved. For example, significant updates to profile contents, or another user has since submitted a profile modification. If the draft becomes invalid, you can print the invalid draft for reference, but you will have to start a new modification request.
- From the Institution profile wizard, select 'Start' from the Modify profile panel to open the Review and modify profile page.
- Review or modify the affiliation details:
- From the Review affiliation details page, review and edit the desired fields.
- Select 'Address+' to add addresses (optional).
Note: Add secondary addresses if, for example, there are multiple campus addresses that are used when referencing the organization or if the address is cited in multiple languages.
- Select 'Next'.
- Review and remove affiliation alternate names. Alternate names are derived from the Affiliation as listed in documents.
- Select 'View details' to review the documents that contain the alternate name.
- Select 'No' to indicate that none of the documents belong to the organization. Alternatively, select the trash icon from the Review alternate name panel.
- Select 'Yes' to individually deselect documents that contain the incorrect or inappropriate name. Untick each document containing the incorrect name.
The details view lists documents associated with alternate names for the institution. If none of the documents listed belong to the institution, selecting No has the same outcome as deleting from the Review alternate name panel. If some documents do belong, remove inappropriate documents by deselecting them in the View details panel. In this case, the Alternate name is kept in the profile, but the deselected items are removed.
- Select 'Apply'. Requested changes are only submitted to Scopus when you review and confirm all potential changes at the end of the process.
- Select 'Next'.
- Find and add alternate names:
- Select 'View details' or the add icon ('+') to review the documents containing an alternate name.
Note: Document clusters that have been reviewed or edited show a check or edit icon on the Add alternate names panel indicating that documents have been reviewed or edited.
- Select 'No' to indicate that none of the documents belong to the organization.
- Select 'Yes' to individually deselect documents that contain the incorrect or inappropriate name. Untick each document containing the incorrect name and select 'Apply'.
- To search for more names, use the Search for more form.
- Select 'Apply'. Requested changes are only submitted to Scopus when you review and confirm all potential changes at the end of the process.
- Select 'Review changes and confirm'.
- From the Confirm changes page:
- Review the updates to be applied to the organization
- Review and edit your contact details
- Enter any additional details or comments regarding the profile update
- Select 'Submit'. Your request is submitted to Scopus.
Once submitted, you cannot modify the institution profile until it is processed by Scopus (four to six weeks). You will receive a notification when it is completed.
Note that changes are not immediate and do not appear in Scopus, or within the Institution Profile Wizard, until processing is complete.
Use the Create profile tool to create a profile if no affiliation profile is listed for an institution, and if the affiliation output needs to be counted separately.
Make sure to avoid creating duplicate profiles. Creating duplicates may cause a split in document attribution.
- From the Institution profile wizard, select 'Start' from the Create profile panel.
- Enter the necessary information in the corresponding fields:
- Preferred name
- Institution home page URL
- Primary mailing address (street, city, country, postal code)
- Select 'Address+' to add addresses (optional).
Note: Add secondary addresses if, for example, there are multiple campus addresses that are used when referencing the organization or if the address is cited in multiple languages.
- Select 'Next'.
- Find and add alternate names:
- Select 'View details' or the add icon ('+') to review the documents containing an alternate name.
Note: Document clusters that have been reviewed or edited show a check or edit icon on the Add alternate names panel indicating that documents have been reviewed or edited.
- Select 'No' to indicate that none of the documents belong to the organization.
- Select 'Yes' to individually deselect documents that contain the incorrect or inappropriate name. Untick each document containing the incorrect name and select 'Apply'.
- To search for more names, use the Search for more form.
- Select 'Apply'. Requested changes are only submitted to Scopus when you review and confirm all potential changes at the end of the process.
- Select 'Review changes and confirm'.
- From the Confirm changes page:
- Review the updates to be applied to the organization
- Review and edit your contact details
- Enter any additional details or comments regarding the new profile
- Select 'Submit'. Your request is submitted to Scopus.
How are institution profiles created?
Scopus builds profiles for an institution from the affiliation text in the articles it indexes. Algorithmic processing identifies documents with affiliation text matching the name variations, then links these into same institution profile.
Due to the great variation in the way affiliations are represented by authors and publishers, this automated process can never be exact. Some variants may be missed, others inappropriately included.
Manual review of alternate names by a person with knowledge of the institution is needed to make sure the profile is complete and correct as possible.
Alternate names in affiliation profiles are the variations of institute name derived from the affiliation text in published articles for the institution in question. For example:
|
|
|---|---|
Anatomy-Farm Cornell University Medical College, Mohegan Lake, NY, United States |
Anatomy-Farm Cornell University Medical College |
Department of Cell Biology, Anatomy Cornell University Medical College New York, NY 10021, United States |
Anatomy Cornell University Medical College New York |
The text used by authors and publishers may vary considerably, there may be spelling or punctuation errors in affiliation texts, and names may change over time. Scopus creates profiles for an institution, grouping all of their articles together. The institution profile contains all of the different names found in the articles that belong to the institution.
As documents are added to Scopus, algorithmic processing groups the affiliations recognized as similar into clusters. The clusters are compared to the known information about institutions in the organization database. If a match of sufficient certainty is found, the documents are assigned to the profile for that institution. When it is not possible to be certain, a cluster remains unlinked to any profile. These clusters are shown in IPW as alternate names. They are labelled with the most likely, or most frequent, information derived from the affiliations contained within them.
When alternate names change, entries may disappear or reappear after removal. Because the clusters are not fixed entities, but based on probabilities, they can change as information is added to the matching system from new articles, selection made using the IPW, and other curation efforts. This input can increase the certainty about any cluster or document, allowing reorganization of the contents into consistent groups.
What happens when I remove an Alternate name?
In the Institution Profile Wizard, removing an Alternate name will remove any documents in which the affiliation contains that Alternate name from the profile.
Alternate names can sometimes be due to a mistake (e.g., incorrect spelling) made by the author(s) in the affiliation text of an article. Users should take care not to remove an alternate name that is wrongly spelled or incorrect because they will not only remove the (incorrect) textual name, but also the attached document(s).
Removing an alternate name will affect linking of documents to the profile, both now and in future.
What happens when I add an Alternate name?
In the Institution Profile Wizard, adding an Alternate name will cause the profiling algorithm to link all past and future documents with affiliations containing both that Alternate name and the institute address to the profile. This has an effect not only on documents already in Scopus, but also on future matching of documents to the profile.
Note that Scopus can add an Alternate name to the profile only when there is at least one document in document in Scopus where the Alternate name occurs in the affiliations.
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