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Scopus
ProducerElsevier (Netherlands)
History2004-present
Languages40[citation needed]
Access
ProvidersElsevier
CostSubscription
Coverage
DisciplinesLife sciences, Social sciences, Physical sciences, Health sciences
Record depthIndex, abstract and citation indexing
Format coverageArticles, articles-in-press, books, chapters, conference papers, data papers, editorials, errata, letters, notes, patents, preprints, retracted articles, reviews, short surveys
Temporal coverage1788-present
Geospatial coverageWorldwide
No. of records100 million
Update frequencyDaily
Print edition
ISSN2588-9885
Links
Websitewww.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][needs update] The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvement in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price. Free database The Lens completes the triad of main universal academic research databases.[citation needed]

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] At present, Scopus indexes the following patent databases: United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); European Patent Office (EPO); Japan Patent Office (JPO): World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); UK Intellectual Property Office.[4][5]

Overview

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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."[6] A small number of studies found approximately an 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.[7][jargon]

Also, when the same article was covered in Scopus and in the Web of Science, its Scopus entry had a keyword ratio 3-5 of than its WoS counterpart, 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 in 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,[8] 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.[9]

Scopus IDs for individual authors can be integrated with the non-proprietary digital identifier ORCID.[10]

In 2018, Scopus started embedding partial information about the open access status of works, using Unpaywall data.[11] However, Scopus' RIS export files do not contain the information about Open Access status.[citation needed]

Several studies looked into the comparison of the number of publications indexed in the academic research databases. In a 2024 publication from the University of Jordan the publications from their university referenced in several databases were compared. The authors found, that the degree of coverage decreases in the order: Scopus, Web of Science, The Lens.[12]

A 2024 study from Spain concluded that zero-cost The Lens, which combined the data from Crossref, PubMed, Core and OpenAlex, had the largest coverage, with more than 247 million bibliographic records.[13] No-cost Open Alex had the second largest coverage of about 240 million publications in total. Free SciLit came in third with 149 million of publications agglomerated from Crossref, PubMed, preprint repositories and publishers. Web of Science Core Collection came in fourth with 85 million. records. Scopus was the fifth with 78 million records. While no database was comprehensive, the coverage overlap between any two databases was substantial.

A 2025 study from a medical university in China limited to scleral contact lenses concluded that Scopus had 3.6% more references than Web of Science.[14]

Content selection and advisory board

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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.[15] The board consists of scientists and subject librarians. Nevertheless, critique over a perceived conflict of interest has continued.[16]

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.[17] 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 46,534[18] and excluded 688 titles[19] Between 2016 and 2023, the CSAB has re-evaluated 990 titles published by 539 different publishers, leading to 536 titles discontinued for indexing.[20] In 2024 Scopus covered around 28,000 active journals and nearly 300,000 books.

Nevertheless, research continues to show the inclusion of predatory journals.[21][22]

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".[23]

Scopus AI

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Scopus AI, launched by Elsevier in January 2024, is a generative AI tool designed to revolutionize research by leveraging the world's largest database of curated scientific literature. This functionality aims to assist researchers and institutions in obtaining fast, accurate summaries and insights to enhance research collaboration and societal impact.[24]

According to Maxim Khan, then the VP of Analytics, Products and Data Platform at Elsevier, Scopus AI provides the following benefits:

  • Expanded summaries
  • Foundational and Influential paper identification
  • Academic Expert Search which is a form of search dedicated to identifying experts in specific fields.[25]

Derived citation metrics

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See also: Source Normalized Impact per Paper, Field-weighted Citation Impact, and Science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators

CiteScore

[edit]
This section is an excerpt from CiteScore.[edit]

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.[26]

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.[27]

SCImago Journal Rank

[edit]
This section is an excerpt from SCImago Journal Rank.[edit]
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.

See also

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Scopus

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Scopus is a proprietary abstract and citation database developed and operated by , an company, and launched in November 2004 to compete with established bibliometric tools like . It aggregates and indexes scholarly outputs including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, books, and book chapters across more than 330 disciplines in the physical sciences, life sciences, health sciences, and social sciences. As of early 2025, the database encompasses over 100 million records from 28,791 active journals and proceedings sourced from more than 8,000 publishers worldwide, with historical coverage dating back to 1788 for select materials. Scopus provides tools for , author profiling, calculations, and research trend visualization, enabling users to assess scholarly impact and identify influential works. Despite its utility in research evaluation and funding decisions, the database has drawn criticism for including titles suspected of practices and for perpetuating access barriers through high subscription costs, highlighting tensions between commercial interests and open scholarship.

History

Launch and Initial Development (2004–2010)

Scopus was launched by Elsevier in late November 2004 as a proprietary abstract and citation database, developed as a direct competitor to Thomson Reuters' Web of Science with an emphasis on multidisciplinary coverage spanning scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences domains. The initiative aimed to address perceived limitations in existing tools by aggregating content from a wider array of publishers and disciplines, including stronger representation in social sciences where Web of Science had historically been narrower. Upon release, Scopus indexed approximately 14,000 peer-reviewed journals from over 4,000 publishers, supplemented by books and conference proceedings, drawing initially from Elsevier's extensive journal portfolio and early data-sharing agreements with other entities. This foundational corpus was built through an evidence-based approach involving consultations with 21 academic institutions to refine search functionalities and content prioritization. To enable robust citation analysis, the database incorporated backfilled historical data, with cited references traceable to 1996 and select document archives extending to 1966 for certain titles, facilitating retrospective tracking absent in some competitors at the time. Between 2004 and 2010, initial growth efforts centered on expanding this aggregation via partnerships with publishers like Springer and Wiley, increasing active titles to over 15,000 by 2007 while prioritizing peer-reviewed sources for credibility.

Expansion and Key Milestones (2011–Present)

In the 2010s, Scopus underwent substantial expansion in content volume and diversity, growing from approximately 55 million records in 2011 to over 70 million by 2017, driven by increased indexing of conference proceedings, book chapters, and trade publications alongside its core journal coverage. This period saw enhancements to author profiling capabilities, with the introduction of automated Scopus Author Profiles that improved precision in linking publications to individual researchers, achieving average precision rates of 98.1% and recall of 94.4% for profiled outputs. These updates facilitated better disambiguation of author names and affiliations, supporting more reliable bibliometric analyses amid rising global research output. Responding to the proliferation of open access (OA) models post-2010, Scopus expanded its OA tracking infrastructure, incorporating indicators to flag OA journals and articles at both document and source levels, which enabled users to filter and analyze OA content separately from subscription-based materials. By the early 2020s, the database surpassed 90 million records, reflecting broader inclusion of non-journal content such as ebooks and series, while maintaining rigorous selection to align with evolving publishing standards. Data export functionalities were refined to support integration with external tools, including altmetrics aggregators, allowing for complementary assessments of research impact beyond traditional citations. In , Scopus marked its 20th anniversary since launch on November 3, 2004, with the database encompassing over 88 million records from more than 27,000 active titles and 7,000 publishers. Throughout the year, Scopus conducted multiple source list reviews, adding 97 new journals in September alone while excluding dozens of titles across monthly updates—such as 14 in March-April and 12 in December—for failures in editorial quality, citation irregularities, or other criteria aimed at curbing predatory practices. By February 2025, the content item count exceeded 100 million, underscoring continued growth in scale and adaptation to digital publishing trends.

Database Description and Core Features

Scope and Content Coverage

Scopus provides multidisciplinary indexing of peer-reviewed literature spanning physical sciences, life sciences, health sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, encompassing journals, , stand-alone books, and . Document coverage includes over 100 million items as of February 2025, with approximately 12.9 million conference papers drawn from 167,000 events and 3.56 million book items from 1,283 and 399,000 stand-alone titles. The database draws from more than 7,000 publishers worldwide and over 28,000 active titles as of 2025, with content extending back to 1788 but fuller abstract and citation data prioritizing post-1996 publications to reflect modern scholarly output growth. Limited inclusion of gray literature appears through 2.64 million preprints added from seven servers since 2021, though sets and patents receive minimal direct indexing. Geographically, representation spans global publishers, yet empirical analyses indicate underrepresentation of non-English-language outputs, which constitute less than 7% of content despite support for 40 languages, alongside reduced visibility for non-Western scholarly production relative to English-dominant regions. Annual updates incorporate rising publication volumes, including 25.1 million open access articles from 8,137 dedicated journals.

Search, Indexing, and Analytical Tools

Scopus offers an advanced search interface enabling users to construct queries using operators including , and NOT to combine terms across fields such as titles, abstracts, keywords, authors, affiliations, and DOIs. Additional filters refine results by publication year, document type (e.g., articles, conference papers), subject area, and access type (e.g., ). Search outputs support export in formats like RIS (compatible with ), , and CSV, with limits such as up to 2,000 records per CSV export. These features facilitate precise querying of over 87 million records, including 1.8 billion cited references as of recent coverage. Indexing in Scopus involves capturing author-supplied keywords alongside indexed keywords enhanced by thesauri or controlled terms, such as additional matched concepts including chemicals and CAS Registry Numbers. This dual approach, applied to content from more than 27,950 peer-reviewed journals, aids discoverability while maintaining curated quality through expert oversight in content selection. Author disambiguation relies on proprietary Scopus Author IDs generated algorithmically, with integration to identifiers allowing users to link profiles for improved attribution accuracy across publications. Analytical tools in Scopus enable computation of the at author and institutional levels, derived from citation counts within the database. Trend visualization features display historical citation patterns, such as annual citation volumes, through built-in graphs and reports. Citation overviews provide network-like views of citing and cited documents, with data exportable for external analysis of connections, supporting evaluations of research impact without relying on external metrics. These capabilities cover analyses across 40+ languages and 5,000+ publishers, ensuring comprehensive tracking grounded in the indexed corpus.

Content Selection and Quality Control

Advisory Board and Selection Criteria

The Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) is an independent body of international experts, including , researchers, journal editors, and librarians, organized into 17 subject chairs representing major scientific disciplines. Established in 2005 shortly after Scopus's launch, the CSAB promotes transparent content policies by evaluating proposed titles for inclusion using both quantitative metrics, such as citation patterns, and qualitative assessments, including reviews of sample articles. The board's ensures decisions prioritize scholarly rigor over commercial interests, with members selected for their field-specific to maintain balanced representation across disciplines. Journals must first satisfy technical prerequisites, such as consistent , regular publication schedules, and provision of English-language titles and abstracts, before CSAB evaluation on core criteria emphasizing empirical standards. These include adherence to ethical publishing policies (e.g., transparency in authorship and conflicts of interest), content reflecting original scholarship with demonstrated citation potential, journal regularity through timely issue releases and stable editorial practices, and long-term online via archiving. The process assesses citedness not merely as volume but as evidence of meaningful scholarly impact, while requiring robust mechanisms to filter low-quality submissions. The CSAB conducts ongoing reviews of indexed content, monitoring for deviations like excessive self-citation rates or editorial lapses that undermine integrity, with provisions for delisting titles that fail to sustain these standards. Quarterly automated checks flag outliers in citation behavior, complementing the board's periodic qualitative re-assessments to enforce causal in coverage quality. Public disclosure of these criteria since 2005 enables verifiable scrutiny, distinguishing Scopus's approach from less transparent indexing systems.

Journal Inclusion, Exclusion, and Recent Updates

Scopus conducts annual re-evaluations of its indexed journals through metrics-based assessments, benchmarks, monitoring for irregularities, and reviews of publication concerns, resulting in periodic inclusions and exclusions to maintain coverage . In , this process led to the addition of 66 new journals and the discontinuation of 45 titles due to failures in meeting performance standards such as volume and editorial rigor. These changes reflect ongoing cycles where journals are flagged by automated models running regularly across the database, prompting re-evaluation for issues like low or procedural lapses. Exclusions often target predatory or compromised publications, with heightened scrutiny post-2020 on anomalies such as hijacked journals featuring fake editorial boards or sham archives. For instance, in May 2025, removed a journal from Scopus following inquiries into its deficient processes, illustrating reactive measures to preserve indexing . While AI tools for detecting predatory traits have been explored externally, Scopus's internal flagging relies on and manual board oversight, contributing to incremental removals like the three journals discontinued in June 2025 ("Coke and Chemistry," "International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems," and "ZooNotes"). Such exclusions reduce the risk of low-quality infiltration but can narrow coverage in niche or emerging fields until replacements are vetted. Inclusions balance these losses, with Scopus adding journals based on demonstrated output and compliance; for example, 373 new titles were accepted in September 2025, expanding the active roster to over 28,000 peer-reviewed sources as of that period. These updates have empirically stabilized disciplinary representation, as evidenced by the database's multidisciplinary scope encompassing life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences, though removals in underperforming areas like certain subfields have prompted shifts toward higher-volume outlets. Policy adjustments in December 2024, such as eliminating the two-year minimum requirement for new journals and mandating generative AI disclosure policies, have accelerated inclusions while intensifying post-indexation monitoring to mitigate future quality drifts. Overall, these dynamics ensure Scopus's journal count hovers around 25,000–28,000 active titles in 2025, with net effects enhancing citation reliability at the expense of transient coverage gaps.

Citation Metrics and Analytics

CiteScore Metric

is a journal-level citation metric developed by , calculated using Scopus data as the number of citations received in a given year by documents published in the previous four years, divided by the number of citable documents published in those same four years. Citable documents encompass peer-reviewed content types including articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers. The metric was first released in December 2016 and is updated annually, providing values for over 29,000 active titles as of the 2023 release. The formula can be expressed as: CiteScore (year Y)=Citations in year Y to documents published in Y−4 to Y−1Number of citable documents published in Y−4 to Y−1\text{CiteScore (year } Y\text{)} = \frac{\text{Citations in year } Y \text{ to documents published in } Y-4 \text{ to } Y-1}{\text{Number of citable documents published in } Y-4 \text{ to } Y-1} For instance, the 2021 uses citations received in 2021 to documents published from 2017 to 2020, divided by the number of citable documents from 2017 to 2020. This approach employs a four-year document window, contrasting with the two-year window in the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), and focuses solely on peer-reviewed items to enhance comparability across disciplines. Compared to the proprietary JIF, offers broader coverage by including a wider array of document types beyond research articles and reviews, such as and book chapters, thereby capturing more comprehensive scholarly output. Its methodology is fully transparent, with numerator and denominator data publicly accessible via Scopus previews, enabling independent verification without subscription barriers. The extended four-year window contributes to greater stability, reducing year-to-year volatility influenced by anomalous citation patterns or publication delays in fields with longer citation lags. Empirical analyses indicate strong positive correlations between and JIF values, with Pearson coefficients ranging from approximately 0.43 to 0.87 across disciplines, reflecting aligned but not identical impact assessments due to differences in database scope and calculation periods. The longer window in typically results in lower volatility, as evidenced by steadier rank changes over time compared to the more fluctuating two-year JIF, particularly in slower-citing fields like social sciences.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

The (SJR) is a size-independent metric that measures the scientific prestige of scholarly journals by applying an iterative based on to the Scopus citation network. Unlike raw citation counts, SJR weights incoming citations according to the prestige of the citing journals, propagating influence through the network to emphasize quality over quantity; this process iterates across subject-specific categories to normalize for variations in field size, citation density, and practices, while incorporating self-citations with moderated impact via the prestige transfer mechanism. Developed by the SCImago research group and introduced in 2007, the SJR algorithm draws from principles similar to , computing journal prestige as the principal eigenvector of a weighted derived from three years of Scopus citation data, excluding citations from the same year to focus on established influence. Calculations occur separately within Scopus's 27 subject areas and over 300 subcategories, ensuring adjustments for interdisciplinary differences and preventing larger fields from dominating rankings; the resulting SJR value reflects both citation volume and the hierarchical prestige of sources, providing a first-principles assessment of relative journal impact. SJR-derived quartile rankings classify journals into (top 25% by SJR within categories), Q2, Q3, and Q4 (bottom 25%), offering a standardized tool for researchers and institutions. These rankings, along with SJR values, are freely accessible via the SCImago Journal & Country Rank portal, which relies exclusively on licensed Scopus data without proprietary alterations beyond the SJR computation. Updates to SJR and quartiles are released annually in , synchronized with Scopus's database refreshes to incorporate the latest citation records.

Other Scopus-Derived Indicators

The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) metric, derived from Scopus data, quantifies contextual citation impact by normalizing for field-specific citation densities. It is computed as the ratio of a source's citations per to the aggregate citation potential within its subject category, using a three-year citation window. This adjustment mitigates biases from varying publication and citation norms across disciplines, such as higher citation volumes in versus . Scopus supplements with rankings for individual documents, journals, and authors, positioning them relative to peers in comparable subject areas or time frames. For example, an article's citation reflects its standing against all Scopus-indexed documents from the same year and category, with top s indicating outsized influence. These rankings, updated annually, facilitate nuanced evaluations beyond absolute counts. At the institutional level, Scopus derives affiliation profiles that rank organizations by publication volume, citation totals, and normalized impacts, often visualized through APIs or integrated tools like SciVal. These profiles also generate collaboration maps depicting co-authorship networks and international partnerships, based on parsed affiliation data from indexed documents. Such outputs support benchmarking but depend on accurate disambiguation of institutional names. Scopus incorporates PlumX Metrics for altmetric indicators, tracking non-academic engagements like shares, mentions, and document citations as proxies for broader societal reach. These are displayed alongside traditional metrics for eligible articles, drawing from over 20 platforms. Access remains proprietary within Elsevier's , limiting independent verification and potentially underrepresenting open or non-Western sources.

AI Integration

Development of Scopus AI (2024)

Elsevier announced the development of Scopus AI in August 2023 as an extension of its Scopus database, aiming to incorporate to enhance research discovery through interfaces. The initiative stemmed from 's recognition of researchers' need for faster insights amid growing publication volumes, leveraging the database's indexed abstracts and metadata from over 25,000 active titles. Initial prototyping focused on hybrid search capabilities, combining traditional Scopus indexing with (LLM) processing to enable query interpretation and response generation grounded in verified content. An alpha version launched in August 2023, followed by beta testing involving thousands of global researchers through late 2023, including targeted pilots such as one at the from November 20 to December 15, 2023. This phase incorporated iterative feedback to refine accuracy, reduce hallucinations via data grounding, and ensure alignment with academic workflows, with community input emphasizing transparency in AI-generated outputs. Elsevier's approach included agreements with LLM providers to prevent external data leakage, hosting the system on secure infrastructure like . Scopus AI officially launched on January 16, 2024, as a purchasable overlay module for Scopus subscribers, powered by OpenAI's LLM integrated with retrieval-augmented generation techniques using anonymized Scopus and content for context-specific responses. The rollout prioritized empirical validation through pre-launch testing to address AI limitations, such as factual inconsistencies, by enforcing citations to source documents and human-curated data filters, though the underlying LLM remained proprietary without disclosed domain-specific fine-tuning. This development positioned Scopus AI as 's response to competitive AI tools in academic search, building on the database's established indexing infrastructure established since 2004.

Functionalities, Biases, and Technical Limitations

Scopus AI provides capabilities for query refinement through real-time optimization using a copilot interface, which iteratively refines search prompts to enhance relevance and comprehensiveness of results drawn from Scopus metadata and abstracts. It supports citation recommendations by identifying key papers via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques, including RAG Fusion and semantic reranking models like SML, to prioritize highly relevant documents. Abstract synthesis features enable the generation of topic summaries, concept maps visualizing relationships between ideas, and overviews of emerging themes, powered by models such as miniLM and integrations with OpenAI's GPT for processing peer-reviewed content. The 2024 Deep Research functionality extends this by employing agentic AI to autonomously develop multi-step research plans and compile comprehensive reports, accelerating literature reviews. These features are accessible exclusively to institutional subscribers of the Scopus database, with usage tied to subscription agreements that vary by ; or non-subscriber access is not available. Biases in Scopus AI arise primarily from its reliance on Scopus-indexed content, which disproportionately includes -published journals due to the company's ownership and selection processes, potentially skewing recommendations toward Elsevier-heavy domains and underrepresenting independent or competitor outlets. A 2025 analysis noted this structural favoritism as an unknown but plausible risk, compounded by training data derived from a customized version of ChatGPT-3.5 fine-tuned on resources, which could amplify commercial incentives over neutral representation. Hallucinations—generations of plausible but factually unsupported claims—persist as a documented limitation, as the AI may infer connections or details beyond verified metadata, requiring researchers to cross-verify outputs against primary sources. Technical constraints include dependency on the Scopus database's , where indexing omissions, delays in coverage updates (typically monthly for new content), or metadata inaccuracies propagate into AI outputs, limiting reliability for rapidly evolving fields. Unlike web-based LLMs, Scopus AI does not incorporate real-time publications or unindexed preprints, restricting its utility to historically indexed materials and excluding dynamic sources like uploads post-cutoff. This static foundation, while enhancing trustworthiness relative to open-web scraping, enforces a causal lag in insights, as AI responses reflect database snapshots rather than instantaneous global research activity.

Criticisms, Biases, and Controversies

Structural Biases in Coverage and Representation

Scopus exhibits structural biases in its coverage, with approximately 90% of indexed publications in English, limiting representation of non-English scholarly output. This linguistic skew is evident across disciplines, where natural sciences exceed 90% English content, while social sciences and surpass 75%, per analyses of indexed articles. Such dominance arises from indexing policies requiring English abstracts for non-English journals, which filters out many regional publications without sufficient international alignment. Empirical studies from the 2020s reveal pronounced underrepresentation of Global South research, where Scopus indexes far fewer journals from , , and than produced locally. For instance, over 25,000 journals primarily from the Global South, containing more than 5.8 million articles, remain excluded, as compared to regional platforms like and Redalyc that capture this bibliodiverse output. African journals, in particular, face gross underproductivity in Scopus due to stringent eligibility standards, with analyses showing systemic gaps relative to continental scholarly production. These biases stem from selection criteria emphasizing trackable citations over at least two years, peer-review rigor, and editorial consistency—attributes more prevalent in high-visibility Western journals that garner international citations. Non-Western and journals, often prioritizing local languages and contexts with lower cross-border citation rates, struggle to meet these thresholds, perpetuating a feedback loop where low initial visibility hinders future inclusion. The resultant skewed representation distorts global research evaluations, as Scopus metrics increasingly inform funding allocations and tenure decisions, marginalizing non-STEM and Global South contributions. Researchers from these regions encounter barriers like language demands and limited metric accrual, exacerbating cycles of underfunding and reduced academic advancement, while normalizing STEM-centric benchmarks that undervalue humanities outputs such as regional arts scholarship. This dynamic undermines assumptions of Scopus as a neutral global repository, favoring outputs aligned with Western citation norms over diverse empirical realities.

Quality and Integrity Issues

In 2023, researcher Anna Abalkina documented 67 hijacked journals that had infiltrated Scopus since 2013, with 33 indexing unauthorized content published on fraudulent websites and 23 compromising the official homepage links in their Scopus profiles. Hijackers typically replicate legitimate journal branding, including fake editorial boards populated with real or fabricated scholar names, to deceive indexing databases and authors seeking prestige. These lapses enable the dissemination of low-quality or articles, as evidenced by a text similarity revealing high plagiarism rates in such journals. A notable 2024 incident involved a hijacked journal that indexed nearly 900 inauthentic articles in Scopus between 2020 and 2024, prompting of pre-indexing verification processes. Predatory journals previously included in Scopus have also exhibited self-citation manipulation, with rates far exceeding those of established journals in the same categories, inflating metrics like before eventual delisting. For instance, analysis of discontinued predatory titles showed systematic deviations from best editorial practices, including misleading citation claims that distorted research evaluation. Elsevier responded by removing homepage links from Scopus source details pages for affected journals to mitigate redirection to scam sites, alongside ongoing re-evaluation of titles based on content quality and ethical breaches. However, gaps persist in proactive pre-publication checks, as human oversight struggles with the volume of submissions, and new AI-assisted tools focus more on post-indexing analysis than preventing initial inclusions. These issues underscore causal vulnerabilities in relying on publisher self-reporting for editorial integrity, allowing transient predatory elements to embed before detection.

Commercial Practices and Elsevier's Market Dominance

Scopus operates under a proprietary subscription model owned by , restricting access to paying institutional customers through tiered licensing agreements that vary by user volume, institution size, and negotiation terms, thereby generating revenue streams integral to Elsevier's analytics portfolio. This paywalled structure contrasts sharply with open alternatives such as or OpenAlex, which provide free bibliographic searching without comprehensive proprietary indexing, potentially limiting equitable access for unaffiliated researchers or under-resourced institutions. 's scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing division, encompassing Scopus, reported revenues exceeding £2 billion in 2010 with profits of £724 million, reflecting margins estimated by analysts at 40-50% before tax, driven in part by bundled database and journal subscriptions. Criticisms of this model intensified in the amid academic boycotts targeting 's pricing practices, including the 2012 Cost of Knowledge petition signed by over 16,000 researchers protesting "exorbitantly high" subscription costs and profit margins that strained budgets, with similar dynamics applying to database access like Scopus. These actions highlighted how 's bundling of journals and tools, including Scopus, enforced "all-or-nothing" deals that amplified costs for comprehensive coverage, contributing to serials crises where institutions allocated up to 40% of materials budgets to a fraction of publishers' outputs. Such practices have fueled tensions with advocates, who argue that proprietary barriers hinder dissemination, though maintains that investments in curation and analytics justify the fees. Elsevier's market dominance in citation databases stems from Scopus's aggregation of metadata from approximately 25,000 active titles, primarily in STM fields, creating a near-monopolistic hold on proprietary, curated datasets alongside Clarivate's , with free tools like offering broader but less structured coverage. This exclusivity enables Elsevier to leverage network effects, where institutional reliance on Scopus for metrics like reinforces subscriptions, as alternatives lack equivalent depth in backward and forward citation linking. Commercial incentives under this regime appear to prioritize expansion in high-revenue STEM disciplines, where funding agencies and institutions demand robust analytics, evidenced by Scopus's emphasis on , , , and journals over or social sciences, potentially marginalizing less profitable areas despite calls for diversified representation. Group, Elsevier's parent, derives nearly half its operating revenue from scientific publishing, underscoring how such dominance sustains elevated profitability amid critiques of reduced accessibility.

Academic Impact and Comparisons

Usage Statistics and Influence on Research Evaluation

Scopus indexes over 100 million content items as of February 2025, encompassing journals, books, , and preprints across more than 7,000 publishers, with approximately 2.4 billion cited references tracked. These metrics underpin key bibliometric tools, including the , which quantifies researcher productivity and impact by identifying the largest number h of publications cited at least h times. Institutions frequently incorporate Scopus-derived values into hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, as the database's citation data provides a standardized measure of scholarly influence. Adoption of Scopus varies by discipline, with higher usage in and applied sciences due to robust journal coverage, while and social sciences exhibit lower reliance owing to the prevalence of non-journal outputs like monographs, which constitute up to 50% of publications and receive limited indexing. This disciplinary skew amplifies Scopus's footprint in STEM fields, where citation metrics inform over 70% of evaluated outputs in some analyses, compared to under 30% in . Scopus data significantly shapes national research evaluations and resource allocation, particularly in Europe and Asia, where rankings such as and employ its citation counts for institutional assessments. For instance, the UK's (REF) and Australia's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) integrate Scopus metrics to benchmark performance, influencing grant distributions totaling billions annually. However, this reliance can distort outcomes, as uneven coverage—such as underrepresentation of Asian publications—may disadvantage non-Western or non-English outputs in funding and ranking decisions. Critics argue that overemphasis on such metrics incentivizes quantity over quality, potentially skewing research priorities toward high-citation fields despite acknowledged limitations in capturing broader societal impact.

Comparisons with Web of Science and Open Alternatives

Scopus indexes over 27,000 active journals and more than 308,000 conference proceedings series, offering broader coverage than , which covers approximately 21,000 active journals and fewer conference records. This disparity is particularly evident in social sciences, , and conference-heavy fields like and , where empirical analyses since the have shown Scopus capturing 10-20% more publications in non-journal formats compared to 's emphasis on peer-reviewed journals with stricter selection criteria. maintains greater legacy prestige in natural sciences and high-impact legacy journals, often serving as the benchmark for institutional rankings due to its longer historical depth dating back to 1900. Metric comparisons reveal strong equivalences between Scopus's and Web of Science's Journal Impact Factor (JIF), with correlation coefficients typically ranging from 0.80 to 0.95 across disciplines, though 's four-year citation window versus JIF's two-year period results in higher values for journals with delayed impact, such as in . Field-specific sensitivities arise from differing normalization methods; for instance, incorporates document types beyond citable items, potentially inflating scores in multidisciplinary areas, while JIF prioritizes core articles and reviews, favoring established outlets. Studies confirm these metrics rank journals similarly in over 80% of cases, but divergences exceed 20% in rapidly evolving fields like , where Scopus's broader source base amplifies citations. Open alternatives like Dimensions and OpenAlex provide free access to expansive datasets, with OpenAlex indexing over 250 million works compared to Scopus's 100 million, emphasizing comprehensiveness over curation. Dimensions, developed by , offers similar journal coverage to Scopus (around 25,000 sources) with integrated but relies on aggregated data from multiple providers, leading to less standardized quality filtering and higher noise in non-English or emerging outputs. These tools reduce barriers for global researchers, capturing 15-30% more open-access content than Scopus or , though they exhibit greater variability in citation tracking due to automated ingestion without manual editorial review. Empirical evaluations position OpenAlex as a viable complement for broad discovery, but databases retain advantages in verified prestige metrics for evaluation purposes.

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