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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the pros and cons of computing the h‐index using Scopus.

The paper looks at the content features and the software capabilities of Scopus from the perspective of computing a reasonable h‐index for scholars.

Although there are limitations in the content, and even in the mostly excellent, swift, powerful and innovative software of Scopus, it can produce a much more reliable and reproducible h‐index – at least for relatively junior researchers – than Google Scholar.

The paper adds insight into computing the h‐index using Scopus.

As the humanities develop in the realm of increasingly more pronounced digital scholarship, it is important to provide quality subject access to a vast range of heterogeneous information objects in digital services. The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of affairs of the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles with particular reference to the well-established subject access needs of humanities researchers, with the purpose of identifying which improvements are needed in this context.

The comparison of subject metadata on a sample of 649 peer-reviewed journal articles from across the humanities is conducted in a university repository, against Scopus, the former reflecting local and national policies and the latter being the most comprehensive international abstract and citation database of research output.

The study shows that established bibliographic objectives to ensure subject access for humanities journal articles are not supported in either the world's largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.

In all, not much has changed since 1990s when indexing for the humanities was shown to lag behind the sciences. The community of researchers and information professionals, today working together on digital humanities projects, as well as interdisciplinary research teams, should demand that their subject access needs be fulfilled, especially in commercial services like Scopus and discovery services.

The h‐index has been used to evaluate research productivity and impact (as manifested by the number of publications and the number of citations received) at many levels of aggregations for various targets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the bibliometric characteristics of the largest multidisciplinary databases that are the most widely used for measuring research productivity and impact.

The paper presents preliminary findings about the Scopus database. It is to be complemented and contrasted by the bibliometric profile of the Web of Science (WoS) database.

The test results showed that 18.7 million Scopus records had one or more cited references, representing 42 per cent of the entire database content. The ratio of cited reference enhanced records kept slightly increasing year by year from 1996 to 2009. Scopus classifies the journals and other serial sources into 27 broad subject areas by assigning its journals to 21 science disciplines, four social science disciplines, a single Arts and Humanities category, and/or a multidisciplinary category. The distribution of records among the broad subject areas can be searched in Scopus using the four‐character codes of the subject areas. A journal or a single primary document may be assigned to more than one subject area. However, Scopus overdoes this, and it significantly distorts the h‐index for the broad subject areas. The h‐index of the pre‐1996 subset of records for the 21,066,019 documents published before 1996 is 1,451, i.e. there are records for 1,451 documents in that subset that were cited more than 1,450 times. The total number of citations received by these 1,451 papers (i.e. the h‐core, representing the number of items that contribute to the h‐index) is 4,416,488, producing an average citation rate of 3,044 citations per item in the h‐core of the pre‐1996 subset of the entire Scopus database. For the subset providing records for 23,455,354 documents published after 1995, the h‐index is 1,339, so the total number of citations must be at least 1,792,921. In reality the total number of citations received by these papers is 3,903,157, yielding a citation rate of 2,915 citations per document in the h‐core. For the entire Scopus database of 44.5 million records the h‐index is 1,757.

Knowing the bibliometric features of databases, their own h‐index and related metrics versus those of the alternative tools can be very useful for computing a variety of research performance indicators. However, we need to learn much more about our tools in our rush to metricise everything before we can rest assured that our gauges gauge correctly or at least with transparent limitations. Learning the bibliometric profile of the tools used to measure the research performance of researchers, departments, universities and journals can help in making better informed decisions, and discovering the limitations of the measuring tools.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of recent experiments in determining the h‐index at the country level for the 10 Ibero‐American countries of South America.

The three citation index components (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) of the Web of Science system of Thomson‐Reuters and the Scopus database of Elsevier are used to gauge the comparability of the h‐indexes reported by the two systems.

The results show that in spite of the significant differences in the content of the two databases in terms of their source base and the extent of cited reference enhancement of records, the rank correlation of the ten countries based on the h‐index values returned by Web of Science and Scopus is very high.

For this sample, in spite of differences between WoS and Scopus in the number of papers from each country, the rank position of the countries by the h‐index is almost the same. There is only a single rank position difference – Scopus rank Argentina second and Chile third, while the order is the reverse in WoS. This reconfirms the robustness of the h‐index at the country level.

Performing efficient literature searches and subscribing to the most comprehensive databases for interdisciplinary fields can be challenging since the literature is typically indexed in numerous databases to different extents. Comparing databases will help information professionals make appropriate choices when teaching, literature searching, creating online subject guides, and deciding which databases to renew when faced with fiscal challenges. The purpose of this paper is to compare databases for searching the chemical engineering literature.

This paper compares journal indexing and search recall across seven databases that cover the chemical engineering literature in order to determine which database and database pair provide the most comprehensive coverage in this area. It also summarizes published, database comparison methods to aid information professionals in undertaking their own comparative assessments.

SciFinder, Scopus, and Web of Science, listed alphabetically, were the leading databases for searching the chemical engineering literature. SciFinder-Scopus and SciFinder-Web of Science were the top two database pairs. No single database or pair provided 100 percent complete coverage of the literature examined. Searching a second database increased the recall of results by an average of 17.6 percent.

The findings are useful since they identify “best bets” for performing an efficient search of the chemical engineering literature. Information professionals can also use the methods discussed to compare databases for any discipline or search topic.

This paper builds on the previous literature by using a dual approach to compare the coverage of the chemical engineering literature across multiple databases. To the author’s knowledge, comparing databases in the field of chemical engineering has not been reported in the literature thus far.

Diversity is one of the main characteristics of modern societies. To be teachers and trainers, it is necessary to use all the tools to respond to students with diversified needs. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to review the scientific production in Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS of 1996-2019 on the application of Virtual reality in people with Autism Spectrum Disoders (ASD) for the improvement of social skills.

For this purpose, two databases have been used: The Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS from the advanced search tab. After applying the search terms, 267 documents were obtained which were analysed according to a series of indicators.

The results indicate that the period 2016-2019 was the most productive and that SCOPUS has a focus on conferences and WOS is intended for journals. Furthermore, in SCOPUS, there are journals with higher quartiles (Q1) than in WOS. The study shows the great importance of virtual reality in people with ASD and its recent dissemination.

Currently, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies on the use of virtual reality in people with ASD using bibliometric indicators. The study allows us to know which databases publish higher quality research. Likewise, information can be obtained about the most productive centres and the most important authors on the subject.

Many researchers in ResearchGate (RG) engage in scholarly activity and share research findings. The researchers' activities in this social network may increase the probability of their works being cited. Thus, this study aims to examine the status of RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators of the allied medical sciences lecturers and their association with their academic rankings.

A cross-sectional, descriptive analytical study was performed. As a first step, the names of all 50 lecturers at the School of Allied Medical Sciences were searched through RG to find all the lecturers with profiles. Then, the h-index as well as the number of citations by them were extracted from Scopus. Spearman's correlation coefficient test was performed to explore the association of the RG score with the Scopus citation indicators and the academic rankings of the lecturers.

The findings demonstrated that there is a statistically significant relationship between the RG indices (except the question and answer indices) and the Scopus citation indicators with the academic rankings of the lecturers (p-value < 0.01).

Knowledge of the significant relationship between the RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators may encourage the lecturers to make more efforts to be active on RG. Furthermore, policymakers can encourage their researchers and lecturers to be more active in this scientific social network, which could lead to promoting the university rankings in the global and national rankings systems.

The study aims to assess the journal packing density (JPD) of the research journals published across different subject discipline at the global level. The concept of JPD is aimed to compute the average number of research articles published per volume or per issue of a research journal in any given subject discipline. The study also discusses about the leading research journals publishing countries and continents across the world and their average JPD. An attempt has also been made to identify the leading research counties having maximum JPD in any given subject discipline.

The study covers 27 major research subject disciplines widely popular all across the globe. To undertake the present study, data were retrieved from SCImago Journal and Country Ranking.

In all, 36,081 research journals were indexed by Scopus across 27 major subject disciplines at the global level till 2015. During the period 2013-2015, 11,023,122 research articles were published in 36,081 research journals across 27 major subject disciplines at the global level at an average of 101.84 research articles per journal per volume. This means the average JPD of the research journals at the global level is 101.84 research articles per journal per volume. Chemistry, physics and astronomy and multidisciplinary journals are the three leading subject disciplines to have the maximum JPD, namely, 266.66, 253.92 and 242.53 research articles per journal per volume. JPD of research journals published in the sciences is higher than the JPD of research journals published in the social sciences and humanities. Business, management and accounting, social sciences and arts and humanities are three subject disciplines having lowest JPD, namely, 44.26, 35.68 and 32.66 research articles per journal per volume, respectively. China, Ireland and The Netherlands recorded the highest average JPD in the research journals published from these counties, namely, 213.39, 178.44 and 135.31 research articles per journal per volume, respectively.

Countries from where a lesser number of research journals are indexed by the popular indexes, such as Scopus, Web of Science, etc., face greater pressure of publishing. To ooze out this pressure, there is need to index more and more research journals from these countries and that can be done only by improving and maintaining the research standard over a period.

The study is original and the first of its kind undertaken at the global level across all the major subject disciplines.

This study aims to provide an extensive overview of OA journals’ status and quality in 27 research areas based on all Scopus-indexed journals. It shows the volume of OA journals, proportion of publications in OA journals and the quality of these journals in comparison with subscription-based counterparts.

This research investigated 22,256 active peer-reviewed journals indexed by Scopus in 2015. Data were gathered using the Journal Metrics website. The current research adopted four indicators to compare the quality of OA and non-OA journals indexed in Scopus under each subject area, namely citedness rate, CiteScore, SNIP and SJR.

OA journals comprised approximately 17 per cent out of the total journals indexed by Scopus in 2015. The results revealed an uneven spread of OA journals across disciplines, ranged from 5.5 to 28.7 per cent. Studying the quality of journals as measured by CiteScore, SJR SNIP leads us to the finding that, in all research areas, except for health profession and nursing, non-OA journals attain statistically significant higher average quality than do OA journals.

Although OA publishing improves the visibility of scholarly journals, this increase is not always coupled with increase in journals’ impact and quality.

The paper aims to report an investigation that was conducted to identify the scholarly publications by faculty members of the Allameh Tabataba’i University that were indexed in two international databases, Science Citation Index (SCI) and Scopus, from the year the databases first included Iranian-authored papers (1987 and 1989, respectively) through the end of 2015.

Scientometric methods and social network analysis techniques were used to conduct the study and to analyze the co-authorship network. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on the data. Quantitative analysis was accomplished using Microsoft Excel, while the qualitative analysis was carried out using HistCite, VOSviewer and Pajek software.

Faculty members had the most international cooperation with colleagues from the USA and Switzerland, and they jointly authored papers with faculty and staff from other universities within Iran. The three institutions with the highest rate of co-authorship included the Islamic Azad University, Tehran University and Amir Kabir University of Technology.

The overall overlap among the two databases was about 21 per cent. The number of papers indexed by Scopus (583 records) was more than that by SCI (410 records). The total number of papers at an international level was much lower than that at the national level (6,426 records) in both the databases.

This paper provides insight into the scholarly works by the faculty of Allameh Tabataba’i University indexed in two international databases, SCI and Scopus. It also examines the co-authorship network structure.