Scopus

Last updated

Scopus
Scopus logo.svg
ProducerElsevier (Netherlands)
History10 November 2004;19 years ago (2004-11-10)
Languages40 languages
Access
Providers Elsevier
CostSubscription
Coverage
DisciplinesLife sciences; social sciences; physical sciences; health sciences
Record depth41,462 indexed titles (2021)
Format coveragecsv, BibText, ASCII, RIS
Temporal coverage1788–present
Geospatial coverageWorldwide
No. of records82.4 million
Update frequencydaily
Links
Website www.scopus.com
Title list(s) www.scopus.com/sources

Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. [1] An ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvent in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price. Free database The Lens completes the triad of main universal academic resarch databases.

Contents

Journals in Scopus are reviewed for sufficient quality each year according to four numerical measures: h-Index, CiteScore, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (source normalized impact per paper). For this reason, the journals listed in Scopus are considered to meet the requirement for peer review quality established by several research grant agencies for their grant recipients and by degree-accreditation boards in a number of countries. [2]

Scopus also allows patent searches from a dedicated patent database, Lexis-Nexis, albeit with limited functionality. [3]

Overview

Comparing ease of use and coverage of Scopus and the Web of Science (WOS), a 2006 study concluded that "Scopus is easy to navigate, even for the novice user. ... The ability to search both forward and backward from a particular citation would be very helpful to the researcher. The multidisciplinary aspect allows the researcher to easily search outside of his discipline" and "One advantage of WOS over Scopus is the depth of coverage, with the full WOS database going back to 1945 and Scopus going back to 1966. However, Scopus and WOS complement each other as neither resource is all-inclusive." [4] A small number of studies found ca. 80-90% overlap in coverage between WoS and Scopus for the period between 1990 and 2020.

In terms of the structured query language search capabilities Scopus is somewhat more advanced than Web of Science: for example, WoS can perform only NEAR/n queries, Scopus can also do PRE/n queries. [5]

Also, when the same article is covered in Scopus and in the Web of Science (WoS), its Scopus entry has a 3-5 larger number of keywords than its WoS coverage, and the Scopus keywords are more focused on the specific article content, whereas WoS has more keywords related to the broad category of the article's subject. A larger number of narrow-targeted keywords allows Scopus users to find a larger number of relevant publications, while filtering out false positives. On the other hand, WoS exports (e.g. in the ris format) the doi numbers of cited articles, while Scopus exports the titles of cited articles. Also, Scopus allows exporting 20,000 references (e.g. as a ris file) at once, while WoS export is limited to 5,000 references at once.

Scopus provides chemical search by CAS number and by chemical name, while WoS does not have these features. On the other hand, WoS has chemical structure search, but only a small number of publications are actually indexed for chemical structure searches. SciFinder is the preferred option for chemical searches is all cases.

Scopus also offers author profiles which cover affiliations, number of publications and their bibliographic data, references, and details on the number of citations each published document has received. It has alerting features that allow registered users to track changes to a profile and a facility to calculate authors' h-index. In 2016, a gratis website, Scopus CiteScore, [6] was introduced. It provides citation data for all 25,000+ active titles such as journals, conference proceedings and books in Scopus and provides an alternative to the impact factor, a journal-level indicator which may correlate negatively with reliability. [7]

Scopus IDs for individual authors can be integrated with the non-proprietary digital identifier ORCID. [8]

In 2018, Scopus started embedding partial information about the open access status of works, using Unpaywall data. [9] However, Scopus' ris export files do not contain the information about Open Access status.

Content selection and advisory board

Since Elsevier is the owner of Scopus and is also one of the main international publishers of scientific journals, an independent and international Scopus Content Selection and advisory board (CSAB) was established in 2009 to prevent a potential conflict of interest in the choice of journals to be included in the database and to maintain an open and transparent content coverage policy, regardless of publisher. [10] The board consists of scientists and subject librarians. Nevertheless, critique over a perceived conflict of interest has continued. [11]

CSAB team is responsible for inclusion and exclusion of different titles on Scopus. The list of journals and books indexed in Scopus is updated 2 to 3 times per year. Each year Scopus receives around 3,500 submissions for new titles to be included and accepts approximately 25% of them. [12] The re-evaluation policy is based on four criteria of Publication Concern, Under Performance, Outlier Performance and Continuous curation. Between 2004 and 2020, Scopus included 41,525 and excluded 688 titles [13] Between 2016 and 2023, the CSAB has re-evaluated 990 titles published by 539 different publishers, leading to 536 titles discontinued for indexing. [14] In 2024 Scopus covered around 28,000 active journals and nearly 300,000 books.

Nevertheless, research continues to show the inclusion of predatory journals. [15] [16]

While marketed as a global point of reference, Scopus and WoS have been characterised as "structurally biased against research produced in non-Western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences". [17]

Derived citation metrics

or Science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators

CiteScore

This section is an excerpt from CiteScore.[ edit ]
Part of a series on
Citation metrics
Locations of papers in a map of science and locations of the key papers for Nobel prizes.tif

CiteScore (CS) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is produced by Elsevier, based on the citations recorded in the Scopus database. Absolute rankings and percentile ranks are also reported for each journal in a given subject area. [18]

This journal evaluation metric was launched in December 2016 as an alternative to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor (IF), calculated by Clarivate. CiteScore is based on the citations collected for articles published in the preceding four years, instead of two or five in the JCR IF. This enhanced methodology was introduced with the release of CiteScore 2019 in June 2020. At launch, CiteScore's neutrality was questioned by bibliometrics experts like Carl Bergstrom, who found it appeared to favour Elsevier's titles over Nature's. [19]

SCImago Journal Rank

This section is an excerpt from SCImago Journal Rank.[ edit ]
Part of a series on
Citation metrics
Locations of papers in a map of science and locations of the key papers for Nobel prizes.tif
The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator is a measure of the prestige of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the prestige of the journals where the citations come from.

Criticism

Recently, an investigation published by "Scholarly Criticism" uncovers that Elsevier is involved in unethical and unlawful practices of promoting its self-published journals by indexing these journals in Scopus which is owned by Elsevier. This develops an interesting situation. According to the "Scholarly Criticism", Elsevier indexed its journal "Heliyon" (start year: 2015) in Scopus within a few months of its inception, without following its own rules prescribed for non-Elsevier journals, indexing in Scopus with just one citation and four published issues in 2015. This is controversial because Scopus is considered as a credible resource to identify high quality journals by many universities, countries, and governments. It is important to mention that Heliyon charges an open access fee of USD 2,100 which is not a small amount. The report published by Scholarly Criticism cites evidence that this is a "violation" and "conflict of interest" of publishing ethics and moral principle. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation index</span> Index of citations between publications

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

<i>American Psychologist</i> Academic journal

American Psychologist is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. The journal publishes articles of broad interest to psychologists, including empirical reports and scholarly reviews covering science, practice, education, and policy, and occasionally publishes special issues on relevant topics in the field of psychology. The editor-in-chief is Harris Cooper.

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

<i>Dalton Transactions</i> Academic journal

Dalton Transactions is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering original (primary) research and review articles on all aspects of the chemistry of inorganic, bioinorganic, and organometallic compounds. It is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and the editor-in-chief is Russell Morris. The journal was named after the English chemist, John Dalton, best known for his work on modern atomic theory. The journal was named a "rising star" in 2006.

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

<i>Biology Letters</i> Academic journal

Biology Letters is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society, established in 2005. It focuses on the rapid publication of short research articles, reviews, and opinion pieces across the biological sciences. The editor-in-chief is David Beerling FRS.

The Science Citation Index Expanded is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield.

<i>The FEBS Journal</i> Academic journal

The FEBS Journal is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. It covers research on all aspects of biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, and the molecular bases of disease. The editor-in-chief is Seamus Martin, who took over from Richard Perham in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web of Science</span> Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate, and currently contains 79 million records in the core collection and 171 million records on the platform.

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal that was established in 2004 and is published by MDPI. The editor-in-chief is Paul B. Tchounwou. The journal covers all aspects of environmental health sciences and public health.

Genes, Brain and Behavior is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in the fields of behavioral, neural, and psychiatric genetics. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society. The journal was established in 2002 as a quarterly and is currently published monthly. G2B is a hybrid open access journal, but two years after publication all content is available for free online.

<i>Water Research</i> Academic journal

Water Research is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on the science and technology of water quality and its management. It was established in 1967 and is published by Elsevier on behalf of the International Water Association. The editor-in-chief is Eberhard Morgenroth.

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

<i>Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology</i>

The Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal. It was established in 1882 as the Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry by the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI). In 1950 it changed its title to Journal of Applied Chemistry and volume numbering restarted at 1. In 1971 the journal changed its title to Journal of Applied Chemistry and Biotechnology and in 1983 it obtained the current title. It covers chemical and biological technology relevant for economically and environmentally sustainable industrial processes. The journal is published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of SCI.

Methods of Information in Medicine is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in medical informatics. It is an official journal of the International Medical Informatics Association, the European Federation for Medical Informatics, and the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology. It is the oldest and longest running journal in its field.

<i>Organic Geochemistry</i> Academic journal

Organic Geochemistry is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier covering research on all aspects of organic geochemistry. It is an official journal of the European Association of Organic Geochemists. The editors-in-chief are Steven Rowland, John Volkman, and Cliff Walters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic</span> Online bibliographic database

Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex and The Lens claim to be successors to Microsoft Academic.

<i>Journal of Environmental Management</i> Academic journal

The Journal of Environmental Management is a semi-monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on environmental science and quality that was established in 1973. It is published by Elsevier and the editors-in-chief are Raf Dewil, Jason Evans, and Lixiao Zhang.

References

  1. ↑ Goodman, David; Deis, Louise (1 January 2005). "Web of Science (2004 version) and Scopus". The Charleston Advisor. 6 (3): 5–21. Archived from the original on 12 August 2023. Retrieved 12 August 2023.
  2. ↑ Archived 2 July 2022 at the Wayback Machine ; Archived 19 May 2023 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ Kulkarni, A. V.; Aziz, B.; Shams, I.; Busse, J. W. (2009). "Comparisons of Citations in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for Articles Published in General Medical Journals". JAMA . 302 (10): 1092–6. doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.1307 . PMID   19738094.
  4. ↑ Burnham, JF (2006). "Scopus database: A review". Biomedical Digital Libraries. 3: 1. doi: 10.1186/1742-5581-3-1 . PMC   1420322 . PMID   16522216.
  5. ↑ Echchakoui, Saïd (2020). "Why and how to merge Scopus and Web of Science during bibliometric analysis: The case of sales force literature from 1912 to 2019". Journal of Marketing Analytics. 8 (3): 165–184. doi:10.1057/s41270-020-00081-9. S2CID   256510471. Archived from the original on 18 May 2023. Retrieved 18 May 2023.
  6. ↑ "Sources". Scopus. Archived from the original on 27 December 2016. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  7. ↑ Brembs, Björn (2018). "Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 12: 37. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037 . PMC   5826185 . PMID   29515380.
  8. ↑ "Scopus2Orcid". Scopus. Archived from the original on 24 July 2014. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
  9. ↑ Else, Holly (15 August 2018). "How Unpaywall is transforming open science". Nature. 560 (7718): 290–291. Bibcode:2018Natur.560..290E. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05968-3 . PMID   30111793.
  10. ↑ "Scopus Content Overview: Content Policy and Selection". Scopus Info. Elsevier. Archived from the original on 24 April 2015. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  11. ↑ "Elsevier are corrupting open science in Europe". TheGuardian.com . 29 June 2018. Archived from the original on 5 January 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
  12. ↑ Wilches-Visbal JH, Pérez-Anaya O, Castillo-Pedraza MC. DISCONTINUED REASONS OF JOURNALS IN SCOPUS: ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS. Bibl, An Investig. 2024;20(1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377727326_Discontinued_reasons_of_journals_in_SCOPUS_analysis_and_reflections?enrichId=rgreq-3545ee0db7d9f06d060445d5327f9219-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzM3NzcyNzMyNjtBUzoxMTQzMTI4MTIyMDIzODc5NkAxNzA2MzI0NjAxNDg1&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationCoverPdf
  13. ↑ "extlistJune2021". Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
  14. ↑ "The importance of high-quality content: curation and reevaluation in Scopus" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
  15. ↑ "IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus". idea-en.cerge-ei.cz. Archived from the original on 27 July 2021. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
  16. ↑ Singh Chawla, Dalmeet (8 February 2021). "Hundreds of 'predatory' journals indexed on leading scholarly database". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00239-0. PMID   33558751. S2CID   231871351.
  17. ↑ Tennant, Jonathan P. (27 October 2020). "Web of Science and Scopus are not global databases of knowledge". European Science Editing. 46: e51987. doi: 10.3897/ese.2020.e51987 . ISSN   2518-3354.
  18. ↑ "How are CiteScore metrics used in Scopus?". Scopus: Access and use Support Center. 29 July 2022. Retrieved 24 May 2023.
  19. ↑ Straumsheim, Carl. "How to Measure Impact". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 13 August 2023.
  20. ↑ "Elsevier Unethically Promotes its Journals via Scopus: The Case of Heliyon". Scholarly Criticism Articles. Scholarly Criticism: A Watchdog on published Business Research. Retrieved 23 April 2024.
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