Today being Hallowe’en, it seems an appropriate time to tell you a horror story. A few weeks ago I posted about the inaccuracy of the Scopus bibliographic database. I’ve contacted Scopus multiple times to supply them with correct data about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but the errors persist. It seems I’ll have to take legal action to get them to correct the false and misleading information Scopus is displaying.
I was recently told about a paper with the title The museum of errors/horrors in Scopus. Written by F. Franceschini, D. Maisano & L. Mastrogiacomo and published in 2016, it demonstrates that people have known how poor Scopus is for many years. Yet still it is used.
Here is part of the abstract:
Recent studies have shown that the Scopus bibliometric database is probably less accurate than one thinks. As a further evidence of this fact, this paper presents a structured collection of several weird typologies of database errors, which can therefore be classified as horrors. Some of them concern the incorrect indexing of so-called Online-First paper, duplicate publications, and the missing/incorrect indexing of references. A crucial point is that most of these errors could probably be avoided by adopting some basic data checking systems.
DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2015.11.006
Eight years on, there’s no sign of scopus adopting “basic data systems” but they don’t really have an incentive to improve do they? It seems the world of research assessment refuses to question the reliability of the product. Critical thinking is an alien concept to the bean counters.
P.S. Oíche Shamhna shona daoibh go léir!
