Bogus Scopus
Just to show that I’m not alone in having severe doubts about the reliability and integrity of Scopus here is an article from Retraction Watch that points out that three of the top ten philosophy journals (according to that database) are fake. Among the facts that could easily have been checked by a competent agency is this:
The same editorial board serves for three journals, with 10 members who are dead.
The article concludes:
Rankings based on Scopus frequently serve universities and funding bodies as indicators of the quality of research, including in philosophy. They play a crucial role in decisions regarding academic awards, hiring, and promotion, and thus may influence the publication strategies of researchers… Our findings show that research institutions should refrain from the automatic use of such rankings.
Quite. Any institute that has signed up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment should not be basing any decisions on Scopus anyway, but I don’t think that goes far enough. Scopus is a corrupting influence. It is high time for universities and other agencies to stop paying their subscriptions and ditch it entirely.
In the Dark 
June 17, 2024 at 11:22 am
Dead editorial board members could still make comments on papers with spectral data….
June 17, 2024 at 12:21 pm
Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Kant…
June 17, 2024 at 11:29 am
Years ago, I checked SCOPUS to see how it handled my old research publications. (For any general readers, it should be explained that I used to be a university researcher and academic who has left university life and have stopped being research active.)
SCOPUS correctly identified a body of my publications in the subject area (dwarf galaxies) in which I had published most. However, it completely overlooked my publications in a number of other fields across extragalactic, Galactic and stellar astrophysics. It puzzled me SCOPUS did not appear to use my ORCID code to link papers together.
This doesn’t matter for me, but overlooking publications could have significant implications for the careers of others, including in job applications in an overcompetitive employment environment. SCOPUS assigned an h-index to me on the basis of only a subset of my publications. One complicating factor in my case is a common surname, but this could be discriminatory in that people with surnames like Smith, Thomas, Patel or Wong may be treated less well than people with surnames like Trumpton-Arkwright or Tufton-Bufton. Perhaps SCOPUS has improved by now and these problems may have been resolved.