{"id":1827,"date":"2013-08-19T16:40:30","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T04:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/?p=1827"},"modified":"2013-09-09T08:30:13","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T20:30:13","slug":"scopus-youre-unravelling-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/2013\/08\/19\/scopus-youre-unravelling-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Scopus, you’re unravelling"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first part of this posting originally appeared on Library Out Loud on Tuesday 13 August. The posting was substantially updated this morning but was then taken off the site – fortunately we are now able to reinstate it. Some minor changes have been made to the penultimate paragraph.<\/strong> If you tweeted it or linked to it last week please do so again as the story has progressed in a rather alarming direction. The address of the posting has changed so links to the earlier version will no longer work.<\/p>\n

Tuesday 13 August<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keen readers of LOL and upholders of scholarly good practice may recall that I took the Scopus database to task earlier this year for indexing the egregious Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Science<\/em>. You can read that posting here<\/a>. Well after quite an amount of twitter action Scopus fessed up that this was a mistake and duly ceased their coverage of this piece of nonsense, although 3,807 records from AJBAS continue to dilute their database and cast doubt on their bibliometric credibility. I followed this up with another posting pointing out that Scopus was still indexing 1<\/em>1 titles from Jeffrey Beall\u2019s Predatory Publishers List, but at least there was some indication from Scopus that they wanted to get their act together.<\/p>\n

Well, not so much. This morning I came across the worst one yet and I have to ask whether Scopus has any vetting procedures at all for the \u201cjournals\u201d it chooses to cover. Here we have it in all its na\u00efve glory the AMERICAN ACADEMIC AND SCHOLARLY RESEARCH JOURNAL<\/em>. (Tada!) I don\u2019t even know where to start with this one, but if you\u2019re reading this at Scopus here are some basic facts about scholarly publishing, not so much Scholarly Publishing 101<\/em> as Scholarly Publishing for Dummies<\/em>. Read this carefully because it\u2019s important. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the title. Any given journal must have a target audience and generally speaking this audience will be defined by the journal\u2019s title \u2013 Social Science and Medicine<\/em>, New Zealand Veterinary Journal<\/em>, Journal of Otolaryngology<\/em>, Journal of Happiness Studies<\/em> and so on. A very small number of journals get away with being more generic and these are well-known titles \u2013 Science<\/em>, Nature<\/em>, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em> and one or two others. They get away with this lack of specialisation by publishing only work of the highest quality and of wide significance, and it\u2019s worth noting that these are all old and very well-established titles \u2013 the only newcomer to this company is Public Library of Science<\/em> which also insists on high quality but has a lesser threshold for significance. There is simply no demand from readers for another journal with no specific subject focus and the only reason for the existence of the American Academic and Scholarly Research Journal<\/em> is to attract authors rather than to be of any value to readers \u2013 the implicit message of the title is that they will publish more or less anything. <\/p>\n

Staying with the title, this journal describes itself as the American<\/strong> Academic and Scholarly Research Journal<\/em> but of the 65 articles in Scopus not a single one has an author based anywhere in either North or South America. Once again, as with the Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Science<\/em>, there is simply no reason for this journal to describe itself as American<\/em> other than for the purpose of misleading. The evidence for this is clearly present in Scopus and a simple algorithm would probably flush out titles like this. I only had to look at it to know it was a dud.<\/p>\n

Indexing by Scopus of AASRJ began this year with volume 5, issue 1. That sounds as if this was a moderately well-established title by the time Scopus began indexing it but this turns out not to be the case. If you go and take a look (did Scopus do this?) you will see that Volume 1 (2009) is made up of a single issue consisting of seven brief abstracts from the \u201cProceeding of the Business & Society Conference, 19 July 2007, Bangladish\u201d while Volume 2 (2010) consists of five abstracts from the same conference (i.e. 2007). Volume 3 Number 1 is dated November 2011 and is the first to contain actual articles \u2013 five of them. So the first three \u201cvolumes\u201d account for a total of 12 meeting abstracts and 5 articles and the journal itself does not really get underway until 2012. I will leave it to readers to decide whether this journal actually existed in 2009 or whether it was cobbled together at a later date, but in any case somehow Scopus had decided by the end of 2012 that it was worth indexing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to comment on the value of the articles themselves, but a look at the references confirms that no real peer-reviewing or editing has taken place. In one article<\/a> the references are arranged alphabetically by the first author\u2019s initial, another<\/a> has used a numbered style in the text but has neglected to number the references at the end which follow no consistent format, while in a third article<\/a> the list of references bears almost no relationship to what is in the text \u2013 there are 15 items in the list of references (which stops mysteriously at the letter P<\/em>) but only 3 in-text citations, two of which do not appear in the list of references. This last example may seem merely a little silly until one reflects on the fact that this article serves to increment the citation count of each of those 15 items by one \u2013 I checked and it does. Now, as a librarian involved in bibliometrics I spend a certain amount of time cautioning eager researchers against the inflated citation counts in Google Scholar and directing them gently back towards more reliable sources like \u2026 Scopus. I take a very dim view of the carelessness that has allowed this sort of junk to contaminate the everyday tools we rely on and as a community of scholars and librarians we deserve a very great deal more. We deserve what we pay for, in fact, which is<\/em> a very great deal.<\/p>\n

One wonders then if there is some other reason to include this title in a database supplied by a reputable publisher (Elsevier) known for the strength of their claims to academic rigour. Perhaps, against the odds, AASRJ has been publishing important work. Scopus didn\u2019t have far to go to check on this, but apparently neglected to, as had they done so they would have discovered that only one article from this journal has so far been cited in their database. This citation is in the International Journal of Engineering and Technology<\/em>, another fairly generic but slightly more honest title and a journal that is undergoing a remarkable publishing boom, going from 60 articles in Scopus last year to an impressive (or alarming) 455 so far this year. <\/p>\n

Scopus, you\u2019re unravelling. The urge to be inclusive may be partly well-intentioned but when you move into uncharted territory you need to be more than normally vigilant. Instead you\u2019ve tucked your shirt into your underpants and are grinning fixedly and hoping no one has noticed. We\u2019ve noticed. It\u2019s just embarrassing. <\/p>\n

So, for the rest of us, what can we do? For myself, I\u2019m sick of pointing this stuff out and I\u2019m also not that keen on annoying the publishers of questionable journals, so this will be my last \u201copen letter to Scopus\u201d. For the rest of you, if you have any influence over the purchase of Scopus or its related products then ask to see their quality control plan and what they intend to do to stop this sort of thing. If you don\u2019t have that sort of influence then draw this to the attention of those who do, as well as linking to this posting and retweeting like mad with the hashtag #scopus. Thanks.<\/p>\n

Bruce White
\neResearch Librarian
\neResearch on Library Out Loud<\/a><\/p>\n

Update Friday 16 August 2013 3.24 pm NZ Time<\/strong>
\nUnfortunately AASRJ has not been available over the Internet today and instead has been displaying the message “Our Journal Management System is under maintenance please come back later.” Consequently the links above are not currently operating. For several hours they were displaying a message referring to this posting but now instead the links have been directed back to blogs.massey.ac.nz. I will leave them in place in the hope that the articles they link to become available again shortly.<\/p>\n

Update Monday 19 August 7.40 am NZ Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s been a funny old weekend for the American Academic and Scholarly Research Journal<\/em>, and it looks as if we’re now into a game of Find the Missing Links. As I reported above, on Friday morning the journal disappeared from the website of the American Academic and Scholarly Research Center to be replaced with the message that their system was under maintenance and that we should come back later. There’s nothing particularly odd about that but when you clicked on the links I had placed in this posting (see above) to illustrate points I was making about deficiencies in the referencing of some of the articles in the journal, you saw instead a threat of legal action against myself and my employers for damaging the business of the American Academic and Scholarly Research Center. I can only assume that this extraordinary claim related to this blog posting as before Tuesday of last week I was entirely innocent of their existence. Anyway, by mid Friday afternoon the links were instead pointing to blogs.massey.ac.nz, which seemed an odd thing to do when the website of a journal unrelated to Massey University is undergoing maintenance, but innocuous enough under the circumstances. Things took a more sinister turn on Saturday evening, however, when the links were instead directed to a badly written and offensive blog posting. By Sunday morning, to my relief, this behaviour had ceased and the American Academic and Scholarly Research Journal had returned; or at least its website and tables of contents had, because any attempt to access the articles, including through the links above, was met by a login request and the advice that a subscription is required to access them. This remains the case on Monday morning. AASRJ, it appears, is no longer an Open Access title, although I am unable at this time to verify subscription details. Also appearing on the website is what appears to be an image of the print issue for November 2011 – except that it is shown as Volume 1, Number 1. That’s exactly what I suggested it should be, which is slightly gratifying, but it can’t be both Volume 1 Number 1 and Volume 3 Number 1. Or if it is, we can’t now be up to Volume 5. That’s just odd.<\/p>\n

So, it might be time for some more home truths about academic and scholarly research and publishing. Once again, I ask our servants at Scopus to read this carefully as well as my new-found colleagues at the AASRJ and the AASRC. Here we go. When you undertake to publish an academic and scholarly journal you take on responsibilities to a number of stakeholders – to your readers, to your authors, to other scholars and the academic research community in general, and also to any indexing services that include your content within their databases and assist you in promulgating the work of your authors and, thereby, creating value for your business. The responsibilities you take on are serious and onerous, and it is entirely fitting that this should be so. Our global community relies on the research carried out by our scholars, and anything that might tend to undermine the quality of this research, including anything that might tend to waste the time of scholars or students (and their support staff) or divert precious research funds into unproductive activities, is to be deplored. So let’s take a look at these stakeholder groups one at a time.<\/p>\n

The readers first. Anyone who writes and publishes has a primary responsibility to the readers of their work to provide them with a product that is fit for purpose. What this means in our context is that when work is described as being academic and scholarly then it needs to conform to very high standards of accuracy and thought so that other scholars, as well as practitioners and the public at large, are able to trust that the knowledge provided is as good as it can possibly be. This is a difficult thing to achieve, but one important way in which it is done is by making sure that the work has been checked and verified by a number of expert eyes before it is published. This is why peer-review is important and this is why we look to our academic journals to provide us with knowledge we can trust. The point I was making about sloppy referencing in AASRJ wasn’t just a librarian being obsessive about referencing (personally I hate referencing with a passion) but that it showed that the articles hadn’t even passed the first and simplest test of being carefully and expertly reviewed, and that readers were being delivered a potentially unreliable product. The other responsibility you have to your readers is to provide them with a product of consistent technical quality and reliability, and a journal that replaces its articles with legal threats, meaningless redirections, offensive blog postings and then a paywall falls well short of that mark.<\/p>\n

Now for the authors. A journal article can take several months to write and most authors will be able to produce only a few each year at most. They will choose to publish in a journal that is going to treat their work with respect and present it in the best possible light, as well as communicating it to the widest possible audience. I commend AASRJ for having managed to get its authors into the Scopus database, questionable as I find this on the part of Scopus. That is only the start of the matter however. If a journal accepts work with insufficient care, and then fails to provide adequate support by way of peer review, it potentially exposes the deficiencies in that work, and those of its authors, to a very wide and critical audience. The academic world can be a tough place and part of the duty of journal editors is to mentor inexperienced scholars and protect them from premature exposure of their work to tough scrutiny and uncompromising criticism. The other responsibility that a journal takes on is to provide high quality and ongoing access to the articles their authors have entrusted to them – this is particularly the case for electronic-only journals such as AASRJ. Speaking for myself I would be completely horrified if I discovered that the links to one of my articles had been replaced by a legal threat to a third party, or an offensive blog posting, or that the Open Access journal in which I had published had retired behind a paywall. I would imagine that those authors who had paid article publishing charges on the understanding that AASRJ was an Open Access title might have a few strong questions unless their articles – and all articles in the journal – are restored to public access as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

Now to the academic and scholarly community – does a journal have a responsibility there? Well, yes, and if it uses the words academic and scholarly<\/em> in its title yes, yes, yes and yes again. First and foremost it needs to promote the highest standards of scholarship through its peer review and production standards, through ensuring that its title accurately describes its true nature and that it adheres to standard academic publishing conventions as far as possible. It also needs to ensure that its articles can be permanently linked to by scholars wishing to make reference to them for any purpose and that they are permanently and securely archived – they are public documents and form part of the scholarly record, particularly if they have been included in a database. But most importantly, it needs to understand that the world of scholarship and research is all about debate and criticism and is a place where threats of legal action are simply unconscionable<\/strong>. No doubt the editors and publishers of AASRJ have found this posting unpleasant reading, but it was really only making three simple and readily verifiable points – that describing their journal as American had no intellectual validity, that their volume numbering system was so unusual as to create suspicion about the editors’ understanding of publishing norms and may also have confused staff at the Scopus database, and that the poor quality of the referencing in the three articles referred to was evidence of an exceptionally low standard of peer review. It is acknowledged that the opinions were expressed in a lively manner, as is normal in blogging, but in each case reference was made to ascertainable facts and the posting fell within well-established scholarly norms of robust criticism based on clear evidence. To threaten legal action on the basis of this criticism, while at the same removing from the view of readers the evidence on which it was based, serves to undermine this entire scholarly tradition and it is unclear how scholarship could even continue to operate in such an environment. There is no doubt that this was just a shot across the bows in the hope that this posting would be quietly deleted, but to do so would have created an unfortunate precedent. This is a serious matter and, although it was initially tempting to laugh it off, the email that was received on Friday morning, and the subsequent repetition of the threat on the AASRC website, were profoundly unnerving and it has taken some time to formulate a response. I most certainly do not expect to be threatened in this manner again and I would suggest that any academic publisher considering using casual legal threats against scholars engaged in scholarly debate in any forum whatsoever should think long and hard before doing so<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I was going to deal with the responsibilities of scholarly publishers to the indexing services that promote their work but this posting has probably gone on for long enough and that is not really my problem. Sort it out among yourselves, but please sort it out soon. If you are reading this at Scopus or Elsevier, just remember that you are known by the company you keep. You have a proud tradition, many would say too proud, but this sort of thing has had little or no place in it. Until now. Hold your head in your hands and cringe. Or weep. For shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first part of this posting originally appeared on Library Out Loud on Tuesday 13 August. The posting was substantially updated this morning but was then taken off the site – fortunately we are now able to reinstate it. Some minor changes have been made to the penultimate paragraph. If you tweeted it or linked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,102,130],"class_list":["post-1827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-databases","tag-scholarly-journals","tag-scopus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1827"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2040,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions\/2040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}