Elsevier Scopus is crap.

It’s really time to abandon Elsevier. German universities canceled their subscriptions. Sweden apparently began now to do so, too. Because Elsevier (and to a lesser extend, other publishers) overcharge universities badly.

Meanwhile, Elsevier still struggles to pretend it offers additional value. For example with the ‘‘horribly incomplete’’ Scopus database. For computer science, Scopus etc. are outright useless.

Elsevier just advertised (spammed) their “CiteScore™ metrics”. “Establishing a new standard for measuring serial citation impact”. Not.

“Powered by Scopus, CiteScore metrics are a comprehensive, current, transparent and “ horribly incomplete for computer science.

An excerpt from Elsevier CiteScore™:

Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Scopus coverage years:from 2002 to 2003, from 2005 to 2015(coverage discontinued in Scopus)

ACM SIGKDD is the top conference for data mining (there are others like NIPS with more focus in machine learning - I’m referring to the KDD subdomain).

But for Elsevier, it does not seem to be important.

Forget Elsevier. Also forget Thomson Reuter’s ISI Web of Science. It’s just the same publisher-oriented crap.

Communications of the ACM: Research Evaluation For Computer Science

Niklaus Wirth, Turing Award winner, appears for minor papers from indexed publications, not his seminal 1970 Pascal report. Knuth’s milestone book series, with an astounding 15,000 citations in Google Scholar, does not figure. Neither do Knuth’s three articles most frequently cited according to Google.

Yes, if you ask Elsevier or Thomson Reuter’s, Donald Knuth’s “the art of computer programming” does not matter. Because it is not published by Elsevier.

They also ignore the fact that open-access gains importance quickly. Many very influencial papers such as “word2vec” have been published first in the open-access preprint server arXiv. Some never even were published anywhere else.

According to Google Scholar, the top venue for artificial intelligence is arXiv cs.LG, and stat.ML is ranked 5. And the top venue for computational linguistics is arXiv cs.CL. In databases and information systems the top venue WWW publishes via ACM, but using open-access links from their web page. The second, VLDB, operates their own server to publish PVLDB as open-access. And number three is arXiv cs.SI, number five is arXiv cs.DB.

Time to move to open-access, and away from overpriced publishers. If you want your paper to be read and cited, publish open-access and not with expensive walled gardens like Elsevier.