Tips on querying WoS and Scopus

Note, that these tips used to work at some point, but may now behave differently. Take this as a starting point, but still rigorously check your results.

Intention	Web of Science	Scopus	Notes
Topic search	TS=(	TITLE-ABS-KEY(
Terms are allowed to appear within (n+2) adjacent words	NEAR/n	W/(n+1)	WoS: carbon NEAR/1 pricing yields carbon pricing and pricing of carbon. carbon W/2 pricing replicates the same search in Scopus. See also "hyphens" for combinations of the within operator and exact phrases in Scopus.
	NEAR/1	W/2
Exact expression	""	{} (not identical)	WoS: the "exact phrase" search in WoS ignores hyphens. "cap and trade" finds both the expressions cap and trade and cap-and-trade. Scopus: the exact phrase search takes into account hyphens. "cap and trade" only finds cap and trade but not cap-and-trade.
e.g cap-and-trade	"cap and trade"	{cap-and-trade} (not identical)
hyphens	hyphens	hyphens	In Scopus: cap-and-trade yields the same results as ({cap and trade} OR {cap-and-trade} OR {cap-and trade} OR {cap and-trade}) (cap-and-trade yields 8 more, probably e.g. cap and trades) In WoS: cap-and-trade yields the same results as "cap and trade" (cap-and-trade yields 5 more e.g. containing the expression "capped and traded") Hyphens can be a convenient to make quries easily transferable from WoS to Scopus as they are interpreted in the same way on both search engines. Applying within operators in Scopus, greenhouse-gas W/2 emission works but {greenhouse gas} W/2 emission is not accepted.
Wildcard for exactly one character	?	?	In WoS the $ can be discarded if it is only applied to search for plurals. The search term emission finds both emissions and emission. Scopus: the search term emission? does find emissions but not emission. The search term emission finds both emissions and emission.
Wildcard for 0 or one character	$	inexistent
Wildcard for 0 or several characters	*	*

Additional notes

• Hyphens are ignored. Words connected by hyphens are interpreted as words separated by spaces.
• Phrases in quotes also find similar expressions. "carbon price" also finds "carbon pricing"; "carbon price"~2 yields the same results as "carbon pricing"~2 [not the case anymore in March 2022]
• Common wildcards accepted on JSTOR do not work. Price yields more results than the queries "pric*" or "price?" [wildcards still don’t work within quotation marks, March 2022]
• ab: or ti: to search in abstracts or titles like on the JSTOR mainpage do not work [this works now, March 2022]
• Underlying query parsers may apply what's called stemming or lemmatisation. Familiarise yourself with these terms, as it might have profound impacts on the search results. For example, try searching for uniform, uniforms, uniformed. It might be, that they are all considered to be the exact same.

Filters

• Conference proceedings in WoS: NOT DOCUMENT TYPES: (Meeting Abstract OR Meeting Summary OR Proceedings Paper)

Useful sub-queries

Clean tech

(
       "sustainable technology"
    OR "green technology"
    OR "clean technology"
    OR "environmental technology" 
    OR "climate technology" 
    OR "mitigation technology"
    OR "renewable energy technology" 
    OR "renewable energy" 
    OR "renewables" 
    OR "sustainable energy"
    OR "wind turbine" 
    OR "wind power"
    OR (
          "wind energy" 
      AND (
        turbine OR generation OR power
      )
    ) 
    OR "solar power" 
    OR photovoltaic
    OR "solar pv" 
    OR "solar thermal energy" 
    OR (
        solar AND cell
    ) 
    OR "solar CSP" 
    OR "hydro electric" 
    OR "hydro power" 
    OR hydroelectric OR hydropower 
    OR "geothermal energy" 
    OR "geothermal power" 
    OR bioenergy 
    OR biofuel 
    OR biodiesel 
    OR bioethanol 
    OR (
            biomass 
        AND (
              power 
            OR electricity
        )
    )
    OR "renewable natural gas" 
    OR biomethane 
    OR biogas 
    OR "energy crop" 
    OR "energy crops" 
    OR "wood pellets" 
    OR "pellet fuels"
    OR "biomass pellets" 
    OR "tidal power" 
    OR "marine current power" 
    OR (
        (
             "marine energy" 
          OR "wave energy"
        ) 
        AND (
               power 
            OR generation
        )
    )
    OR "nuclear power" 
    OR (
            nuclear 
        AND (
                "power generation"
             OR "power plant" 
             OR "electricity generation"
        )
    ) 
    OR "green hydrogen" 
    OR (
            electrolysis 
        AND hydrogen
        AND renewable*
    ) 
    OR "synthetic fuel" 
    OR synfuel 
    OR synfuels 
    OR syngas 
    OR "green steel" 
    OR "zero-carbon cement" 
    OR "carbon neutral cement" 
    OR "heat pump" 
    OR "distributed generation" 
    OR "passive house" 
    OR (
            retrofit 
        AND "thermal insulation"
    ) 
    OR "smart grid" 
    OR "grid storage" 
    OR "grid energy storage" 
    OR "demand response" 
    OR "electric energy storage" 
    OR "sustainable transport" 
    OR "sustainable transportation" 
    OR "green transport" 
    OR "green transportation"
    OR "electric vehicle" 
    OR "electric mobility" 
    OR "energy conservation" 
    OR (
            "energy efficiency" 
        AND (
               improv* 
            OR enhanc*)
    ) 
    OR "energy efficient appliance" 
    OR "energy efficient appliances"
)