Citations and metrics of journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns: the GhoS(t)copus Project
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<ns5:p> <ns5:bold>Background:</ns5:bold> Scopus is a leading bibliometric database. It contains a large part of the articles cited in peer-reviewed publications <ns5:bold>. </ns5:bold> The journals included in Scopus are periodically re-evaluated to ensure they meet indexing criteria and some journals might be discontinued for 'publication concerns'. Previously published articles may remain indexed and can be cited. Their metrics have yet to be studied. This study aimed <ns5:bold> </ns5:bold> to evaluate the main features and metrics of journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns, before and after their discontinuation, and to determine the extent of predatory journals among the discontinued journals. </ns5:p> <ns5:p> <ns5:bold>Methods:</ns5:bold> We surveyed the list of discontinued journals from Scopus (July 2019). Data regarding metrics, citations and indexing were extracted from Scopus or other scientific databases, for the journals discontinued for publication concerns. </ns5:p> <ns5:p> <ns5:bold>Results:</ns5:bold> A total of 317 journals were evaluated. Ninety-three percent of the journals (294/317) declared they published using an Open Access model. The subject areas with the greatest number of discontinued journals were <ns5:italic>Medicine</ns5:italic> (52/317; 16%), <ns5:italic>Agriculture and Biological Science</ns5:italic> (34/317; 11%), and <ns5:italic>Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics </ns5:italic> (31/317; 10%). The mean number of citations per year after discontinuation was significantly higher than before (median of difference 16.89 citations, p<0.0001), and so was the number of citations per document (median of difference 0.42 citations, p<0.0001). Twenty-two percent (72/317) were included in the Cabell’s blacklist. The DOAJ currently included only 9 journals while 61 were previously included and discontinued, most for 'suspected editorial misconduct by the publisher'. </ns5:p> <ns5:p> <ns5:bold>Conclusions:</ns5:bold> Journals discontinued for 'publication concerns' continue to be cited despite discontinuation and predatory behaviour seemed common. These citations may influence scholars’ metrics prompting artificial career advancements, bonus systems and promotion. Countermeasures should be taken urgently to ensure the reliability of Scopus metrics for the purpose of scientific assessment of scholarly publishing at both journal- and author-level. </ns5:p>
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.271 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.045 | 0.121 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it