As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes: Not only did these dubious journals manage to infiltrate the list, but they also rose to its top by trading citations.

Scopus ranks journals based on SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), which it defines as a “measure of journal’s impact, influence or prestige.” The ranking includes a little over 1,000 title. The top 10 are particularly telling. Within that group is exactly one journal – an annual publication dedicated to the work of the Spanish Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega – that specializes in literature. Another two are wide-ranging humanities journals in which literary scholars do publish, although these also are highly idiosyncratic.

The situation becomes only slightly better when we analyze the top 100. In that cohort the number of journals belonging to the fields of literature and literary theory rises to somewhere between 35 and 45, depending on how one counts. However, even with that improvement, well over half of the titles on the list  do not belong there.

What accounts for this failure of most basic classification? One might assume that the creators of the list have simply lumped literature and some adjacent fields together. But Scopus seems to be doing something different. The database has a separate category for Language and Linguistics, and although some journals may publish in both fields (none of the remotely good ones do), many of those included in the Literature category are in fact pure linguistics journals.

Source: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/17/scopus-is-broken-just-look-at-its-literature-category/