Scopus 1900–2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals

Abstract

Scientometric research often relies on large-scale bibliometric databases of academic journal articles. Long term and longitudinal research can be affected if the composition of a database varies over time, and text processing research can be affected if the percentage of articles with abstracts changes. This article therefore assesses changes in the magnitude of the coverage of a major citation index, Scopus, over 121 years from 1900. The results show sustained exponential growth from 1900, except for dips during both world wars, and with increased growth after 2004. Over the same period, the percentage of articles with 500+ character abstracts increased from 1% to 95%. The number of different journals in Scopus also increased exponentially, but slowing down from 2010, with the number of articles per journal being approximately constant until 1980, then tripling due to megajournals and online-only publishing. The breadth of Scopus, in terms of the number of narrow fields with substantial numbers of articles, simultaneously increased from one field having 1000 articles in 1945 to 308 in 2020. Scopus’s international character also radically changed from 68% of first authors from Germany and the USA in 1900 to just 17% in 2020, with China dominating (25%). Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00177

Research coauthorship 1900–2020: Continuous, universal, and ongoing expansion

“…Another important limitation is that the extent to which Scopus's coverage of academic journals has changed over time is unclear, although it is known that its total coverage has Quantitative Science Studies expanded greatly (Thelwall & Sud, 2022). Some journals may have been not produced or lost during the Second World War as universities and libraries were looted, damaged, or destroyed (Van der Hoeven & Van Albada, 1996), for example.…”

“…Scopus may also have been more (or less) inclusive in its selection policy for older years, given that it does not attempt to index everything (Mabe & Amin, 2001). More recently, because the coverage of Scopus changes every year, the inclusion of single large journals or groups of journals from a country or publisher can also impact the results (Thelwall & Sud, 2022). It is impossible to know how reliable the results are from different decades because of changes over time in the coverage of Scopus, but it seems likely that older results are increasingly less reliable, as some of the data may have been lost when retrospectively added after Scopus was created.…”

Top 100 Cited Research of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) in Education From 2012 to 2021

“…This research uses the Scopus database in the form of .RIS and .CSV. Scopus is the largest database that includes abstracts to literature citations that can be searched and organized based on the needs of researchers (Henriquez et al, 2022;Stefanis et al, 2022;Thelwall & Sud, 2022). Scopus is under the auspices of Elsevier (Purnell, 2022;Caputo & Kargina, 2022).…”

Winners and runners-up alike?—a comparison between awardees and special mention recipients of the most reputable science award in Colombia via a composite citation indicator

“…Scopus has a more comprehensive journal coverage and broader social science inclusion than WoS (Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016 ; Baas et al, 2020 ; Waltman and Larivière, 2020 ). Also, despite being an Anglo-American/Western-oriented database, the international coverage authorship in Scopus from higher-income countries such as the US, the UK, or Germany showed a decrease since 2000, while developing regions have increased their participation significantly (e.g., China and India) (Thelwall and Sud, 2022 ).…”