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I have practically the same question as in here.

My most read/reference article is published in a Scopus indexed journal. The article is from 2016, and its indexed by Google Scholar.

However, when browsing the papers by that journal in Scopus, my article is just not there. Why would this happen? Is this a mistake, or genuinely someone/something in the system decided that my article does not meet some criteria?

If its a mistake, can I do something to fox it?

If its because my article does not pass some criteria, which criteria?

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  • Please also look here, especially "a few papers are still being added up to three years after publication": academia.stackexchange.com/questions/63599/… Although this doesn't resolve your question, it gives you an idea of the patience required. Commented May 2, 2018 at 14:36
  • @henning huh interesting.... Weirdly my article is their most referenced/accessed one (its a small journal), I would have expected that if there is an algorithm that samples from the journals, I'd start with the most accessed/read papers. Commented May 2, 2018 at 14:39

3 Answers 3

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No, Scopus did not choose not to index your specific paper. Such decisions would undermine the purpose of an index.

There are three reasons a paper may not be indexed in Scopus (or Web of Science or SciFinder etc.):

  1. The paper falls outside the index scope (journal is not indexed (or was not indexed at the time of publication), paper type is not indexed).
  2. The paper will be indexed; however, the process is not instant, and it has not happened yet.
  3. For some reason, the paper has been missed. (I had a paper published once where the entire journal issue got missed by Scopus and WoS, somehow.)

To check whether your paper should be indexed, perform the following steps:

  1. Check that the journal was indexed at the time of publication. (Instructions for checking Scopus coverage here ; instructions for WoS here.)
  2. Check that sufficient time has elapsed for the paper to be indexed. The best way to do this is to look for newer content from the same journal. Once that appears, you can be certain your paper has been missed somehow.

Once you're sure your paper's been missed, you can complete the appropriate form to have missing information added to the index. Scopus, here; WoS, here.

A similar procedure can be followed for all curated indices/databases, but not for black-magic voodoo databases like Google Scholar.

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Something probably went wrong. It shouldn't take this long to index.

I would contact the journal / publisher and ask. It's possible your article "did not pass" some criteria, but those aren't fixable by you - the criteria is probably something like "we need your files in this format and the publisher did not provide it".

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I got a reply from the Journal. I apparently articles are manually added and while the article is older, the journal has recently been added to Scopus.

To answer the question: email the journal about this issue.

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