What are Topics?
Last updated on February 26, 2025
A Topic is a collection of documents with a common intellectual interest in SciVal that represent fields of research.
Topics are multidisciplinary and researchers work in various research areas, contributing to multiple Topics. Topics are based on clustering the citation network of 95% of Scopus content (all documents published from 1996). Each Topic is clustered within SciVal based upon direct citation analysis using document reference lists (a document can belong to only one topic). As newly published documents are indexed, they are added to Topics using their reference lists. This makes Topics dynamic and most will increase in size over time.
You can find Topics in Scopus on Document details pages with their prominence percentile score, as well as on Author details pages.
Topic Prominence combines three metrics which indicate the momentum of the topic within a field of study and ranks the topic by prominence of these citation patterns. Calculating Topic Prominence combines three metrics:
- Citation count in year n to papers published in n and n-1
- Scopus view count in year n to papers published in n and n-1
- Average Journal CiteScore for year n
For more information, see Topic Prominence on Elsevier.com.
SciVal is a research performance assessment tool that helps organizations and researchers to analyze and benchmark research output. SciVal consists of two analysis sections:
- Explore – Provides key research performance metrics for any entity in SciVal, including researchers, institutions/organizations, topics, countries, and more.
- Compare – Allows you to compare and benchmark the research performance of one or multiple entities and monitor their progress.
For more information, see About SciVal.
Do I have access to SciVal?SciVal is a different Elsevier product and is separate from Scopus. Access is dependent upon your organization's subscription entitlements. It is best to verify SciVal access with your organization administrator. For more information, visit www.scival.com.
SciVal uses Scopus data since 1996, therefore only documents published from 1996 onwards can contribute to a Topic. Even if your Scopus paper contributes to a Topic, it still may not be visible in the Topic window in Scopus or SciVal, because the date window used to display Topics in Scopus and SciVal may not cover the year the paper was published. For example, a document published in 2014 belongs to a topic called “Vocal Tract; Lip; Robot”. Since the last full five years is the default window used in Scopus and SciVal to analyze Topics, the document belongs to the topic, but the contribution (citation counts, view counts, authors, etc.) is outside the time window and is not visible.
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