AUTO TEMBUS SCOPUS | PENJELASAN SYARAT SCOPUS LANGSUNG DARI PIHAK ELSEVIER
Foreign so I definitely didn't come here to talk about my family. We have quite an intense agenda and the agenda is for me to explain to you the scopus content selection process. So how do we select journals in scopus. How do we evaluate them. What are some of the most important aspects for you to to keep in mind. I will really look at it in in quite a lot of detail uh I will invite you to ask questions after I present the the criteria and each study will help me to facilitate this uh Johan has brought gifts so Johan is the man who has uh gifts from elsevier. Uh we don't have enough to give to everyone so we thought how will we decide who we give the gifts to. It could be who the people that are asking the most questions. Maybe they're going to get a small token from elsevier. Um we also created a a survey so an introduction survey whether you're online or you're here if you could take two minutes to fill out the survey that's much appreciated you can either use the QR code or you can use the link here give you a moment to uh to use that link am I using the pointer or am I asking for next slide. This one doctor sang misses how you do it you have to have the right pointer uh foreign. Let's try it like this old school. We're gonna come and look at the slides from here uh introduction as you may know. Scopus is a comprehensive database of peer-reviewed literature and it belongs to a portfolio that we call research intelligence research intelligence are a collection of different uh Solutions and services that help with a lot of things related to search and Discovery and evaluation of research. I will not tell you much about this. It's just something to uh to mention so scope is uh itself has collected 85 million uh papers from about 27 000 serial titles come from about 7 000 um Publishers so we select the content that's in scopus by accepting submissions from from people such as your stocks. Let's get this part every. Journal that's in scopus has three different Journal metrics so we have site score.
We have sjr and we have sniff. This gives you the choice of whether you want to use a field normalized metric like sjr or for snip. Or whether you want to use a more traditional metric like side score these metrics exist for all of the serial titles which are in scopus so they exist for uh 27 000 active titles that are in scopus and that includes 15 000 titles which currently I don't have a journal. Impact factor those journals come from many big Publishers including elsevier but only about 11 of the journals uh in scopus or else of your journals and only about 40 percent of the journals in scope has come from the big Publishers as 60 of the journals and scopus come from smaller Publishers or it could be University press so it the point is that it's we're open to receive submissions from journals. It doesn't matter where you come from or which publisher you're from it's really about the quality and relevance of the journal and that's what I wanted to talk about today is how do you how do you get a sense of if your Journal is ready for scopus or what what we're looking for in a journal um because we receive a lot of submissions and less than half of them so our rejection rate is more than more than 50 in in the world. Yes so if every year on average we receive about 3 500 submissions. Uh about 600 or so of those ultimately make it into scopus so it's a very selective database because we must keep the quality very high and we must ensure that the content is relevant to an international audience. We also re-evaluate journals which are already in scopus. So that's curation because journals can change performance over time journals can actually be moved from one publisher to another different management team so even if a journal is accepted into. Sky office there will be checks to monitor the performance and if there are issues a journal can be discontinued from scurcus. This process is uh managed by a Content selection Advisory Board.
We call it csab. They're an independent. Board of 17 subject chairs. Each one is a prominent researcher in a different field and they are affiliated to different universities in different countries. They work with elsevier but they don't work for elsevier they have a mandate to be objective. We cannot tell them what to do. So there's no commercial bias. They really will look at the submission so when you submit a journal of the scopus ultimately the one of these people will make the decision just one and it would be the subject chair who is matching the subject area of your Journal they will apply a criteria which are quite transparent and that means that I can tell you all about the criteria that they will apply uh today but you must realize it is a person right they are reading um an application as it were and looking at your journal and then looking at your website and um then they're making a decision so that's good to to keep in mind the scope scopus mandate is at a journal level so we select journals and if the journal is selected all of the papers of the journal um moving forward will be indexed in scopus so we do not check every paper or accept some papers and not others right it's um it is at a journal level so either the journal as a whole is indexed in scopus or it's not indexed right we are not looking at um interfering with editorial process or looking at individual papers there are minimum criteria to be in scopus so the minimum criteria are that it must be a peer-reviewed journal so if your Journal is not peer-reviewed then that's it it will not even go to the csab it can be in a different language Bahasa Indonesia is okay for the journal but the abstract must be in English very important because people need to be able to find a paper understand the contents must be a regular publication with at least two years of history with an issn so if your Journal is just starting now you need to wait until you have two years of regular Publications with an issn we used to make it mandatory to have Roman script um references but we recently have changed that so that we accept journals that have different alphabet but for Bahasa.
It's okay because you're using. Roman script um in terms of the the slides. I will give the PDF of the slides to all of the people so you don't have to take pictures every Journal must have a strong Publications epic statement um so the Publications ethics statement. I'll get into all this so if you don't have all of this covered please don't submit to scopus because that's the minimum and it will be sent back and this is pretty easy for you to look at right. It's pretty clear. Okay if you meet these criteria these minimum criteria then the title will be evaluated based on these criteria which fall into five categories so the five categories are Journal policy quality of content Journal standing regularity and online availability and. I'm going to cover all of this in a lot of detail so it's very boring for you Dr sang. I'm sorry thank you so right now scopus has um I think we looked at Pak yoga's presentation 120 Indonesian journals in scopus 106 of those journals are active journals. Um that is it's better than it was some years ago. Some some journals have been added but if. I look at the submission statistics to scopists in the last few years so these are Indonesian journals that were submitted to scopus between 2018 and 2022. Um there were 79 journals were accepted and 427 journals were rejected which makes a rejection rate of of 84 percent uh and that's amongst the highest uh of the world right so if you look at um Pakistan is also 84 turkey is 83 percent uh India is 83 percent um so a lot of journals from Indonesia are being submit to scopus but they're being rejected and this is unfortunate because I know that people submit and they have the best of intentions and they get a rejection letter. And they're like oh oh. I have an embargo I cannot I cannot submit again for another uh three years or five years so I would like to ask you.
Please only submit when you're confident that you meet not just the minimum criteria but that you meet that you have a really strong chance right because it will save you time ultimately if you wait one more year appears to make your. Journal really ready. We'll ultimately save you time rather than submitting. Now wait six months get rejected and have an embargo uh four or five years so. I would like today to help you to understand the my perspective. I've been doing this for 10 years to listen to your stories to look at many many journals that have been um submitted to scar office have read. Many acceptance letters have read many rejection letters. I've helped some prepare some journals to be significant so I have some sense of what I'm doing but I cannot. I cannot look at all of your journals individually. It's too much. I have to teach you to to self-assess critically self-assess yourself. If some of your teachers it's kind of like you teach your students to look at themselves. Objectively right we have to learn to self-assess our own work and um in context of this which is an international database. Maybe the the expectations here are a little bit different than being accepted into a local index. We do help so um there are three ways in which we've been helping local journals to to improve and prepare so we have a number of local scopus boards so these are locally based boards which pre-select journals and we have one in Thailand. I've been trying to expand that one to cover southeast Asia but this has been really difficult with uh with kovitz kind of messing up the the operational plan. Um we do provide a lot of editor workshops together with with the ministry and together with universities. So we're happy to come and explain about this process. We also have a platform for Journal management and visibility called digital Commons which is a great alternative to hjs. So it's not free like rjs but it is a good alternative that can help your.
Journal get more visibility and more impact the selection process itself. Wow look at this light. This is intense. Um it's not that um as bad as it looks okay. But basically knitted by the publisher by the editor uh or an editorial board member in some cases a journal can be submitted by a library but it needs to be a authoritative person that submits the journal. Uh there's an online title suggestion form when you submit you get an email with a Tracker number. That says this is your submission. Uh that tracker number you can use to track your progress. They will check if the journal meets the minimum criteria if if the journal does not meet the minimum criteria then you get an email that says that the journal does not meet the minimum criteria if the journal meets the minimum criteria. It goes into title enrichment so there is a team at elsevier they will look at your journal and they will collect information about the papers. They're going to look how often your papers have been cited in scopus. They're going to look at the editorial board members and they're going to look at the authors that are publishing in your journal they're going to collect that information and then they will pass it on to the subject chair remember. I said there's 17 subject chairs. Each one is an expert in a different subject area so the journal and that whole information package about your Journal will end up in the inbox of that person from the content selection Advisory Board. They will spend an afternoon or morning to go through everything and they will make a decision whether the journal is accepted into scopus or whether it's rejected and they will write a letter which is either a lovely acceptance letter which you read and say. Yes or it's a rejection letter which you read and um brings disappointment but hopefully the rejection letters are meant to also bring some um a constructive criticism on what you need to change right so yeah acceptance and rejection letter.
We've built a tool that can help you to run through. Uh these criteria and to help you self-assess it's called readyforescopus.com. So it's www.readyforescopus.com it will ask you to fill in information about your journal and that will tell you we will help to tell you which aspects of your Journal are meeting the criteria of scopus and which ones maybe need a bit more work right so the tool itself won't tell you everything but it's meant to help guide you through this process and hopefully what I explained to you today will complement that by giving a bit more depth to the process foreign this will be the most intense part of what I'm saying so I I know my Bahasa only sadika it's speaking English quite fast. I hope that you can follow what I'm saying. I will share the PDF of of the slides afterwards with all of you um so those were the criteria I showed you already. The aims and scope of the journal is the most important part. So it's very important that you think about the aims and scope what's the Mandate what's the the vision that your Journal has. Um a lot of the other criteria are evaluated in context of the aims and scope of the journal so it's quite important that aims and scope are clearly defined and it's good if it's a if it's a compelling read if it's clear why your Journal has a particular aim and scope um sometimes we read aims and scope which are very very general or are not grounded in a reason for a particular ancient scope so if when we talk about science often. There's a reason why people are researching something. There's there's a potential there there's a pro important problem that is being solved or an important body of knowledge is being developed if that can be articulated in names and scope saying this is what our Journal is about. This is why this is important. This is why we're doing this right. If that is something which is compelling and clear that is is a good thing. I think not just in this context but many contexts in life so bringing that Clarity to an aims and scope so that it's it's well defined what your Journal is about um and why that's important also you need to consider is your Journal uh an international journal or is it a Indonesian Journal is it a Asian Journal so here to help you answer the question of am I is my journal an international journal or is it a local Journal uh three simple questions is my editorial board very diverse so if um 90 of your editorial board are from Indonesia you're not an international Journal uh do we publish authors from many different countries if almost everyone is from Indonesia then uh the answers now are the topics that we cover relevant to more than one country region so if the topic is what you are publishing about are not relevant to an international audience than probably or not International and I would add to this I made this slide a couple days ago I would add a fourth one that is the aims and scope of your Journal one that indicates International uh the intention to be International or the intention to be Regional so some journals that have been accepted the scopus are very clear that they are Regional journals that focus on challenges in Southeast Asia for example while other journals say we are an international Journal even though we are based in Indonesia we're an international Journal but it has a it has implications for the evaluation my advice is do not try and be an international Journal if if you are not okay so if you're a journal which focuses on uh Indonesian uh challenges or southeast Asia or Asia Pacific um try to leverage your uniqueness try to um look at your strengths and see is this relevant to an international audience scopus does not require the journal to be an international Journal it does require the content to be relevant to an international audience so if we look at this journal here is the Journal of Siam Society this is a Thai Journal they are accepted into scopus they are not an international Journal at all I mean they are a journal that publishes original articles of quality nature on Thailand and neighboring countries in a wide range of disciplines archeology epigraphy history ethnology religion language literature very much about Thailand and the countries surrounding Thailand but the people most knowledgeable about these topics in the whole world are publishing in this journal.
No one knows more about these topics than some of the people that are publishing this journal which is why it's an interesting journal for scopus to have because if someone in South America or in Europe or wherever it is wants to learn about these topics this is a great journal for them to to read about that in and that's why it's a great journal for scopus to have but it's not trying to be an international Journal it's a local Journal right but we had to help this journal to ex to to sell its unique strength and make this clear to the student. Evaluator that when the evaluator goes to the home the web page and reads the ends in scope and sees the submission that they think. Hey this is it's not an international Journal but it's it's really good quality and good for an international audience. We should have this in scopus so think about that because I I see a lot of uh journals in uh Indonesia trying to be International they put the name. International but objectively maybe it's not an international Journal so you need to think about peer review. The journal must be peer-reviewed. It can be an open. Peer review single blind peer review double-blind peer review but it must be peer-reviewed. Um it can be good if the home page and provides a lot of information about the peer review. And how you how do you ensure that the peer review is effectively executed a double bind client. Peer review is difficult because you must hide the the identity of the author and reviewer from each other. Sometimes it helps if you have a bit of information about how do you do this you know how do you achieve this quite challenging workflow.
Another thing that I see the csap like is if the papers themselves have like a submission date and a review date and acceptance date. This brings more trust to to the evaluator to say. Hey it's peer-reviewed. I see information about how the peer review is done for the papers. I can see which day they were submitted. I can see when they were accepted. I can get a sense of how long the review process is so I think all of that together builds a little bit of trust one thing is saying you do a good peer review. The other one is demonstrating that you do this in a responsible and effective plan questionable. Beauty review we see many journals that are promising. We will review your paper in one week guaranteed or in some cases. It's a managing editor. Uh or someone in a minute you know. It's not a dedicated reviewer. We see a lot of Fraud and a lot of predatory publishing these days and you have to be careful to take extra effort to demonstrate that your Journal is a responsible Journal right because there are many journals out there that are trying to trick people to say. Hey we're a scientific journal you know if you pay me 500 we'll publish your paper guaranteed acceptance right so. I'm not saying any of you would do that but because we do have um the challenge of credits for publishing it means that all of us legitimate people with the right intention have to take a bit more effort to um demonstrate the good process and intention that we have unfortunately diversity of the editor so a journal should have an editorial board. The editorial board are the group of people who manage the journal that is an essential part of the journal to have the right people managing the journal and being able to ensure the journal is good today and good in five years and 10 years right so um this is judged on a spectrum from no editorial board which it okay that's game over right no editor you must have an attitude.
Report cannot be an algorithm um Regional diversity of the editorial board is not in line with the editorial concept right or Regional diversity of the editorial board is partly in line with editorial concept so if you said that your Journal isn't International journal the expectation will be that many of your editorial board come from different countries. So if you said it's. International it would be nice if maybe 50 60 of the editorial board come from not just one other country but from different regions because it's International if your Journal is said to be a asean journal southeast Asia then it should have editors that come from some other Southeast Asian countries a few journals in Indonesian Journal then it makes more sense if most of the editorial board are from Indonesia but then it would be good if the editors come from different universities right diversity is um preferred but it's always looked at in line with the editorial concept so again the vision and scope and I'm an international journal or an Indonesian Journal is a key part in for all of the other aspects of the evaluation. The same is for the diversity of authors and reviewers it is judged in context of um the ancient scope of Journal so in international journal the expectation is that many of the authors come from uh from other countries and if it's a regional Journal then it's more understandable if most of the offers come from the region right abstracts um scopus is an abstract in citation database in that we don't have the full text we link to the publisher where you can get the full text or we facilitate downloading of the full text but scopus itself does not index the full text which makes the abstract even more important abstract should be well written in English with with a proper grammar so if it's a Bahasa Journal. Musk translate it really uh professionally. Google translate bad idea. Not it's not going to work right um but we see some abstracts that are grammar is poor.
They're just not well written also. The abstract should be comprehensive so they should cover the not just the the context and the introduction and the methodology should it should cover the kind of introduction methodology results and conclusion comprehensive. What we see is a lot of abstracts are covering only introduction so abstract will say that this paper looks into the history of this or that but it does not explain how it was investigated or what some of the findings are so the abstract should be comprehensive representing the content of the paper in English with with good grammar. Uh it's really important and it's very much in your control because if you have good manuscript right if your submissions are good you have a good manuscript. This is completely under control of the editorial process to you know if the if the first abstract is poor ask them to write a new one or help them to to to improve it content of the papers so here when you submit. I think you're asked to send eight full text articles that are representative of your of you. Journal and the csap might also look at the website and find some other papers what they will look at when they read. The full text is the content in line with the stated aims and title of the journal so again is the content that they are selecting and including does it match with the image and scope of the journal so if the journal says like we are really specifically about non-communicable diseases in um in the tropics and looking at the genetic aspects of it or whatever something very specific and if you look in the journal and you see papers that do not match this it falls outside the aims and scope. Then that's not that's not good. It doesn't show good editorial control uh or it means that the ends in scope are not not accurate um so you have to look between setting and aims and scope and then executing so that the papers that are published match emson scope readability of the. Articles yeah are the Articles nice.
To read is the language good. If it's in bahaska they will find somebody who reads. Bahasa an external reviewer and they will ask them is it is it good so um assume that people will read a handful of the Articles to get a feel of whether they they look good they read well whether they're professional so since I work at elsevier behind the computer for so many years I had to get glasses right. Otherwise everything's blurry. Um sometimes you have a good paper like a good like the manuscript is very good but when you look at the um the figures you can't read them because it's bad quality the printing you know the the resolution is not good so even when you put your glasses on it's like I can't read it or the labels are are unreadable or there are no labels or they accidentally flipped it around the wrong way. Um that's all that's a big shame because if the manuscript is good it's completely within the editorial control to give feedback and say you need to improve the um the visualizations right. You can't read them or I can't read the label um or whatever it is so um poor quality graphs figures tables and so forth. Uh watch out for that because again if the manuscript in principle is good then this is within your power to um to have them improve that academic uh contribution this one is. I think the most subjective criteria so they want to look at I mean if science is about developing bodies of knowledge uh they look at the content in the journal. Look at the papers and judges. This is a contribution to the field to the particular field that you're active in um I've seen some comments and rejection letters that say well the journal is not bad but there are like 3 000 other journals and scopus that do the same thing. There's no different angle. There's there's no unique contribution to the field. There's no new bodies of knowledge or being created and therefore they reject the journal based on it doesn't add value to the reader. It's not doing anything that really takes a body of knowledge from here and and and moves It.
Forward in some way or replicates an important finding or so forth so it's subjective it will be um it will be reviewed by the uh the chair the subject chair but again it's a human being. That's making a decision uh about the academic contribution to the field based on their own experience and looking at your Journal so going back to what I said about your home page your web page and the aims and scope the more that we can demonstrate the importance of of our work in our journal. And say this is why this is important. This is why this contributes to this this endeavor of higher education science research scholarly publishing and so forth in my particular field. So the more that you can demonstrate your contribution better it is citations in contrast are the most objective measure so even if your Journal is not yet in scopus it can be cited by papers which are in scopus right so during your Journal which is not in scopus. The papers can be cited by journals which are indexed in scopus. The grading will be from not cited poorly cited fairly cited well-sided extremely well-sided. Um you can go into scopus and check this yourself. You go into the advanced search you can use the operator ref. This means references. It means you are searching in the references of all the papers that are in scopus. I helped um thank Indonesia with the submission of bulletin economy monetary per banken which had two names because they have the Indonesian name have an English name so I searched for ref using the Indonesian name and then using the English name and I saw that there were 101 papers in scopus which are citing this journal which at the time was not in scopus and I thought 100 is pretty good we also saw that this journal is being cited by papers that are affiliated to Indonesia but also to Malaysia and Australia and the United States so there was some diversity in citations so for this aspect sightedness for this journal we thought this is pretty good every time I say this people in the audience ask me Alex how many citations do I need.
I cannot give you an exact number but it is relevant uh to other journals in your field. So if you're in arts and humanities journal or social sciences the expectation is lower than if you're um in engineering or medicine but I can't give you an exact number I would say. 100 is is always a significant number but if it's like 10. I would say 10 for arts and Humanity. Social science is a good start but 10 for the harder. Sciences is is not much the more citations that you can get the better citations. They cannot argue with. It's not subjective if you have 200 citations in scopus from many different countries and from good journals if you see that your citations come from q1 journals for example uh this is really good and it will be hard unless you really have some other problems with your. Journal it will really help you um so driving the the visibility of your journal. A discoverability of your Journal visibility so that people um find the papers read them and cite them is important but of course you have to start with having good quality manuscript and and all of that right visibility won't help you if the content isn't isn't that good so once the quality of what you are accepting is good. The next step is to how do you bring that to an audience and make sure the right people are reading it and potentially citing it so citations are are important. Editors as mentioned editorial board diversity is important but also who are they um they will look at the each person they probably use the home page and they will look are they are they. Prominent researchers they will try to find the scopus profile. If some some editors might not be researcher maybe it's managing editor has a different background. It's okay but it. I think it's good to demonstrate. Why the editorial board you have like what what is it why. Why are those people the editory board right.
What is it that makes these people um qualified so if there's some way to link to have like profile. Pages or something that that um if an evaluator or a person comes and sees this is the editorial report that if it can be more than just a list of names but there can be some information about who they are and it will become more clear why they're on the editorial board you know what qualification they have um I think that's good publishing regularity basically means that you set a schedule and that you keep to the schedule so if you um say that your Journal publishes once a year then you publish once a year steady if you say we published two issues per year published two issues per year study but don't go like two issues this year go back to one issue go to two right once you once you go from one to two you need to consistently deliver two issues they will look at issues that are not published or or serious delays so they're looking for a regular publication schedule that meets what you have said that you will do so if you say oh we have a lot of good manuscripts. We want to go from one to two issues per year. That's good but you need to be able to consistently deliver to issues per year on time while upholding the quality of what you um what you're publishing online availability. The content must be available online in some way so a journal homepage is important um we include both Open Access journals and non-open access journals so if you want if you're not open access you want it to be behind a password. That's fine but it just needs to be available online. The home page must have an option for English language so if your home page is in. Bahasa it's okay but there must also be an option to have some of the key information in English because again your audience if you're saying I want to be in scopus that means your audience is going to expand to an international audience. Um the quality of the home page is being looked at so they're going to check if it's easy to find out what the aims and scope is who's the editory award if they can find your papers if they can easily download the the full text of these things right so F3 Journal must have a very strong Publications and fix malpractices statement.
Attempts because of predatory publishing the pams needs to comprehensively describe the responsibilities and rights of authors and reviewers and editors but also the consequences of misconduct. So you need to not only say for example to authors you cannot plagiarize other people's work you have to also say if you do plagiarize if we if you submit a paper to us and you we determined that it's plagiarized. The consequences will be this or uh if an edit you know so again it's not just the the rights um and responsibilities but also the consequences of misconduct need to be written you can model this around cope right so the the Publications ethics.org hope could give a lot of help um I think it's not too difficult do not copy paste what a different Journal did right so sometimes I see Journal it's like wow they're just copy paste what someone else did you need to write your own right but use some of the the principles that you see that are well executed elsewhere as a as an example another tip a tip so this is not a rule but it's a tip um if you have HTML in your home page and you also have a PDF of the paper that you can download please make sure that the PDF and the HTML are matching sometimes we go to a website and you look at the article in HTML and then you download the PDF and it's two different versions right. The title is different the abstract is different this happens really often. It's an operational thing it's just a mistake so take care that you have the consistency between the HTML version that people can read online and the actual PDF that you're downloading. It is also strongly preferred if the front page the the cover page of the the article includes the journal name volume issue pages the names of the authors very clearly linked to the affiliation where they are working uh we often see papers where it just says the author name and you don't know where they're working right it doesn't say it um it can be it's not a must but it is preferred.
I see people like it. If there is a day to received accepted and reviewed it brings transparency to the peer review process. It's not a criteria not a must but it. I see that it is effective in demonstrating that so it's uh something to think about at least Journal homepage. I've mentioned it a couple times. It is the first place that the csab go. They have a file but they're going to look at the home page so try to make your home page a nice place to go where it's clear where they can find the different pieces of information. Some things that we think should be included on a home page or are the following um. I won't go through them all. I think that Indonesia's web pages are not not too bad that was the Deep dive on all of the criteria. So it's a lot of information. I went through it very quickly and I will give you the slides again. The aims and scope of the journal are a very central part. A lot of the other aspects are evaluated in context of the engine scope. Um don't try to be. International if you're not look at what your strengths are where you can be strong and treat articulate that in a compelling way and look that the editorial board your authors the topics that you publish in all of that kind of meets this aim that you've um that you've set that set out for yourself. I have um collected some acceptance and rejection letters mostly rejection letters before we go there. I wanted to check if there any questions and invite um.
We have sjr and we have sniff. This gives you the choice of whether you want to use a field normalized metric like sjr or for snip. Or whether you want to use a more traditional metric like side score these metrics exist for all of the serial titles which are in scopus so they exist for uh 27 000 active titles that are in scopus and that includes 15 000 titles which currently I don't have a journal. Impact factor those journals come from many big Publishers including elsevier but only about 11 of the journals uh in scopus or else of your journals and only about 40 percent of the journals in scope has come from the big Publishers as 60 of the journals and scopus come from smaller Publishers or it could be University press so it the point is that it's we're open to receive submissions from journals. It doesn't matter where you come from or which publisher you're from it's really about the quality and relevance of the journal and that's what I wanted to talk about today is how do you how do you get a sense of if your Journal is ready for scopus or what what we're looking for in a journal um because we receive a lot of submissions and less than half of them so our rejection rate is more than more than 50 in in the world. Yes so if every year on average we receive about 3 500 submissions. Uh about 600 or so of those ultimately make it into scopus so it's a very selective database because we must keep the quality very high and we must ensure that the content is relevant to an international audience. We also re-evaluate journals which are already in scopus. So that's curation because journals can change performance over time journals can actually be moved from one publisher to another different management team so even if a journal is accepted into. Sky office there will be checks to monitor the performance and if there are issues a journal can be discontinued from scurcus. This process is uh managed by a Content selection Advisory Board.
We call it csab. They're an independent. Board of 17 subject chairs. Each one is a prominent researcher in a different field and they are affiliated to different universities in different countries. They work with elsevier but they don't work for elsevier they have a mandate to be objective. We cannot tell them what to do. So there's no commercial bias. They really will look at the submission so when you submit a journal of the scopus ultimately the one of these people will make the decision just one and it would be the subject chair who is matching the subject area of your Journal they will apply a criteria which are quite transparent and that means that I can tell you all about the criteria that they will apply uh today but you must realize it is a person right they are reading um an application as it were and looking at your journal and then looking at your website and um then they're making a decision so that's good to to keep in mind the scope scopus mandate is at a journal level so we select journals and if the journal is selected all of the papers of the journal um moving forward will be indexed in scopus so we do not check every paper or accept some papers and not others right it's um it is at a journal level so either the journal as a whole is indexed in scopus or it's not indexed right we are not looking at um interfering with editorial process or looking at individual papers there are minimum criteria to be in scopus so the minimum criteria are that it must be a peer-reviewed journal so if your Journal is not peer-reviewed then that's it it will not even go to the csab it can be in a different language Bahasa Indonesia is okay for the journal but the abstract must be in English very important because people need to be able to find a paper understand the contents must be a regular publication with at least two years of history with an issn so if your Journal is just starting now you need to wait until you have two years of regular Publications with an issn we used to make it mandatory to have Roman script um references but we recently have changed that so that we accept journals that have different alphabet but for Bahasa.
It's okay because you're using. Roman script um in terms of the the slides. I will give the PDF of the slides to all of the people so you don't have to take pictures every Journal must have a strong Publications epic statement um so the Publications ethics statement. I'll get into all this so if you don't have all of this covered please don't submit to scopus because that's the minimum and it will be sent back and this is pretty easy for you to look at right. It's pretty clear. Okay if you meet these criteria these minimum criteria then the title will be evaluated based on these criteria which fall into five categories so the five categories are Journal policy quality of content Journal standing regularity and online availability and. I'm going to cover all of this in a lot of detail so it's very boring for you Dr sang. I'm sorry thank you so right now scopus has um I think we looked at Pak yoga's presentation 120 Indonesian journals in scopus 106 of those journals are active journals. Um that is it's better than it was some years ago. Some some journals have been added but if. I look at the submission statistics to scopists in the last few years so these are Indonesian journals that were submitted to scopus between 2018 and 2022. Um there were 79 journals were accepted and 427 journals were rejected which makes a rejection rate of of 84 percent uh and that's amongst the highest uh of the world right so if you look at um Pakistan is also 84 turkey is 83 percent uh India is 83 percent um so a lot of journals from Indonesia are being submit to scopus but they're being rejected and this is unfortunate because I know that people submit and they have the best of intentions and they get a rejection letter. And they're like oh oh. I have an embargo I cannot I cannot submit again for another uh three years or five years so I would like to ask you.
Please only submit when you're confident that you meet not just the minimum criteria but that you meet that you have a really strong chance right because it will save you time ultimately if you wait one more year appears to make your. Journal really ready. We'll ultimately save you time rather than submitting. Now wait six months get rejected and have an embargo uh four or five years so. I would like today to help you to understand the my perspective. I've been doing this for 10 years to listen to your stories to look at many many journals that have been um submitted to scar office have read. Many acceptance letters have read many rejection letters. I've helped some prepare some journals to be significant so I have some sense of what I'm doing but I cannot. I cannot look at all of your journals individually. It's too much. I have to teach you to to self-assess critically self-assess yourself. If some of your teachers it's kind of like you teach your students to look at themselves. Objectively right we have to learn to self-assess our own work and um in context of this which is an international database. Maybe the the expectations here are a little bit different than being accepted into a local index. We do help so um there are three ways in which we've been helping local journals to to improve and prepare so we have a number of local scopus boards so these are locally based boards which pre-select journals and we have one in Thailand. I've been trying to expand that one to cover southeast Asia but this has been really difficult with uh with kovitz kind of messing up the the operational plan. Um we do provide a lot of editor workshops together with with the ministry and together with universities. So we're happy to come and explain about this process. We also have a platform for Journal management and visibility called digital Commons which is a great alternative to hjs. So it's not free like rjs but it is a good alternative that can help your.
Journal get more visibility and more impact the selection process itself. Wow look at this light. This is intense. Um it's not that um as bad as it looks okay. But basically knitted by the publisher by the editor uh or an editorial board member in some cases a journal can be submitted by a library but it needs to be a authoritative person that submits the journal. Uh there's an online title suggestion form when you submit you get an email with a Tracker number. That says this is your submission. Uh that tracker number you can use to track your progress. They will check if the journal meets the minimum criteria if if the journal does not meet the minimum criteria then you get an email that says that the journal does not meet the minimum criteria if the journal meets the minimum criteria. It goes into title enrichment so there is a team at elsevier they will look at your journal and they will collect information about the papers. They're going to look how often your papers have been cited in scopus. They're going to look at the editorial board members and they're going to look at the authors that are publishing in your journal they're going to collect that information and then they will pass it on to the subject chair remember. I said there's 17 subject chairs. Each one is an expert in a different subject area so the journal and that whole information package about your Journal will end up in the inbox of that person from the content selection Advisory Board. They will spend an afternoon or morning to go through everything and they will make a decision whether the journal is accepted into scopus or whether it's rejected and they will write a letter which is either a lovely acceptance letter which you read and say. Yes or it's a rejection letter which you read and um brings disappointment but hopefully the rejection letters are meant to also bring some um a constructive criticism on what you need to change right so yeah acceptance and rejection letter.
We've built a tool that can help you to run through. Uh these criteria and to help you self-assess it's called readyforescopus.com. So it's www.readyforescopus.com it will ask you to fill in information about your journal and that will tell you we will help to tell you which aspects of your Journal are meeting the criteria of scopus and which ones maybe need a bit more work right so the tool itself won't tell you everything but it's meant to help guide you through this process and hopefully what I explained to you today will complement that by giving a bit more depth to the process foreign this will be the most intense part of what I'm saying so I I know my Bahasa only sadika it's speaking English quite fast. I hope that you can follow what I'm saying. I will share the PDF of of the slides afterwards with all of you um so those were the criteria I showed you already. The aims and scope of the journal is the most important part. So it's very important that you think about the aims and scope what's the Mandate what's the the vision that your Journal has. Um a lot of the other criteria are evaluated in context of the aims and scope of the journal so it's quite important that aims and scope are clearly defined and it's good if it's a if it's a compelling read if it's clear why your Journal has a particular aim and scope um sometimes we read aims and scope which are very very general or are not grounded in a reason for a particular ancient scope so if when we talk about science often. There's a reason why people are researching something. There's there's a potential there there's a pro important problem that is being solved or an important body of knowledge is being developed if that can be articulated in names and scope saying this is what our Journal is about. This is why this is important. This is why we're doing this right. If that is something which is compelling and clear that is is a good thing. I think not just in this context but many contexts in life so bringing that Clarity to an aims and scope so that it's it's well defined what your Journal is about um and why that's important also you need to consider is your Journal uh an international journal or is it a Indonesian Journal is it a Asian Journal so here to help you answer the question of am I is my journal an international journal or is it a local Journal uh three simple questions is my editorial board very diverse so if um 90 of your editorial board are from Indonesia you're not an international Journal uh do we publish authors from many different countries if almost everyone is from Indonesia then uh the answers now are the topics that we cover relevant to more than one country region so if the topic is what you are publishing about are not relevant to an international audience than probably or not International and I would add to this I made this slide a couple days ago I would add a fourth one that is the aims and scope of your Journal one that indicates International uh the intention to be International or the intention to be Regional so some journals that have been accepted the scopus are very clear that they are Regional journals that focus on challenges in Southeast Asia for example while other journals say we are an international Journal even though we are based in Indonesia we're an international Journal but it has a it has implications for the evaluation my advice is do not try and be an international Journal if if you are not okay so if you're a journal which focuses on uh Indonesian uh challenges or southeast Asia or Asia Pacific um try to leverage your uniqueness try to um look at your strengths and see is this relevant to an international audience scopus does not require the journal to be an international Journal it does require the content to be relevant to an international audience so if we look at this journal here is the Journal of Siam Society this is a Thai Journal they are accepted into scopus they are not an international Journal at all I mean they are a journal that publishes original articles of quality nature on Thailand and neighboring countries in a wide range of disciplines archeology epigraphy history ethnology religion language literature very much about Thailand and the countries surrounding Thailand but the people most knowledgeable about these topics in the whole world are publishing in this journal.
No one knows more about these topics than some of the people that are publishing this journal which is why it's an interesting journal for scopus to have because if someone in South America or in Europe or wherever it is wants to learn about these topics this is a great journal for them to to read about that in and that's why it's a great journal for scopus to have but it's not trying to be an international Journal it's a local Journal right but we had to help this journal to ex to to sell its unique strength and make this clear to the student. Evaluator that when the evaluator goes to the home the web page and reads the ends in scope and sees the submission that they think. Hey this is it's not an international Journal but it's it's really good quality and good for an international audience. We should have this in scopus so think about that because I I see a lot of uh journals in uh Indonesia trying to be International they put the name. International but objectively maybe it's not an international Journal so you need to think about peer review. The journal must be peer-reviewed. It can be an open. Peer review single blind peer review double-blind peer review but it must be peer-reviewed. Um it can be good if the home page and provides a lot of information about the peer review. And how you how do you ensure that the peer review is effectively executed a double bind client. Peer review is difficult because you must hide the the identity of the author and reviewer from each other. Sometimes it helps if you have a bit of information about how do you do this you know how do you achieve this quite challenging workflow.
Another thing that I see the csap like is if the papers themselves have like a submission date and a review date and acceptance date. This brings more trust to to the evaluator to say. Hey it's peer-reviewed. I see information about how the peer review is done for the papers. I can see which day they were submitted. I can see when they were accepted. I can get a sense of how long the review process is so I think all of that together builds a little bit of trust one thing is saying you do a good peer review. The other one is demonstrating that you do this in a responsible and effective plan questionable. Beauty review we see many journals that are promising. We will review your paper in one week guaranteed or in some cases. It's a managing editor. Uh or someone in a minute you know. It's not a dedicated reviewer. We see a lot of Fraud and a lot of predatory publishing these days and you have to be careful to take extra effort to demonstrate that your Journal is a responsible Journal right because there are many journals out there that are trying to trick people to say. Hey we're a scientific journal you know if you pay me 500 we'll publish your paper guaranteed acceptance right so. I'm not saying any of you would do that but because we do have um the challenge of credits for publishing it means that all of us legitimate people with the right intention have to take a bit more effort to um demonstrate the good process and intention that we have unfortunately diversity of the editor so a journal should have an editorial board. The editorial board are the group of people who manage the journal that is an essential part of the journal to have the right people managing the journal and being able to ensure the journal is good today and good in five years and 10 years right so um this is judged on a spectrum from no editorial board which it okay that's game over right no editor you must have an attitude.
Report cannot be an algorithm um Regional diversity of the editorial board is not in line with the editorial concept right or Regional diversity of the editorial board is partly in line with editorial concept so if you said that your Journal isn't International journal the expectation will be that many of your editorial board come from different countries. So if you said it's. International it would be nice if maybe 50 60 of the editorial board come from not just one other country but from different regions because it's International if your Journal is said to be a asean journal southeast Asia then it should have editors that come from some other Southeast Asian countries a few journals in Indonesian Journal then it makes more sense if most of the editorial board are from Indonesia but then it would be good if the editors come from different universities right diversity is um preferred but it's always looked at in line with the editorial concept so again the vision and scope and I'm an international journal or an Indonesian Journal is a key part in for all of the other aspects of the evaluation. The same is for the diversity of authors and reviewers it is judged in context of um the ancient scope of Journal so in international journal the expectation is that many of the authors come from uh from other countries and if it's a regional Journal then it's more understandable if most of the offers come from the region right abstracts um scopus is an abstract in citation database in that we don't have the full text we link to the publisher where you can get the full text or we facilitate downloading of the full text but scopus itself does not index the full text which makes the abstract even more important abstract should be well written in English with with a proper grammar so if it's a Bahasa Journal. Musk translate it really uh professionally. Google translate bad idea. Not it's not going to work right um but we see some abstracts that are grammar is poor.
They're just not well written also. The abstract should be comprehensive so they should cover the not just the the context and the introduction and the methodology should it should cover the kind of introduction methodology results and conclusion comprehensive. What we see is a lot of abstracts are covering only introduction so abstract will say that this paper looks into the history of this or that but it does not explain how it was investigated or what some of the findings are so the abstract should be comprehensive representing the content of the paper in English with with good grammar. Uh it's really important and it's very much in your control because if you have good manuscript right if your submissions are good you have a good manuscript. This is completely under control of the editorial process to you know if the if the first abstract is poor ask them to write a new one or help them to to to improve it content of the papers so here when you submit. I think you're asked to send eight full text articles that are representative of your of you. Journal and the csap might also look at the website and find some other papers what they will look at when they read. The full text is the content in line with the stated aims and title of the journal so again is the content that they are selecting and including does it match with the image and scope of the journal so if the journal says like we are really specifically about non-communicable diseases in um in the tropics and looking at the genetic aspects of it or whatever something very specific and if you look in the journal and you see papers that do not match this it falls outside the aims and scope. Then that's not that's not good. It doesn't show good editorial control uh or it means that the ends in scope are not not accurate um so you have to look between setting and aims and scope and then executing so that the papers that are published match emson scope readability of the. Articles yeah are the Articles nice.
To read is the language good. If it's in bahaska they will find somebody who reads. Bahasa an external reviewer and they will ask them is it is it good so um assume that people will read a handful of the Articles to get a feel of whether they they look good they read well whether they're professional so since I work at elsevier behind the computer for so many years I had to get glasses right. Otherwise everything's blurry. Um sometimes you have a good paper like a good like the manuscript is very good but when you look at the um the figures you can't read them because it's bad quality the printing you know the the resolution is not good so even when you put your glasses on it's like I can't read it or the labels are are unreadable or there are no labels or they accidentally flipped it around the wrong way. Um that's all that's a big shame because if the manuscript is good it's completely within the editorial control to give feedback and say you need to improve the um the visualizations right. You can't read them or I can't read the label um or whatever it is so um poor quality graphs figures tables and so forth. Uh watch out for that because again if the manuscript in principle is good then this is within your power to um to have them improve that academic uh contribution this one is. I think the most subjective criteria so they want to look at I mean if science is about developing bodies of knowledge uh they look at the content in the journal. Look at the papers and judges. This is a contribution to the field to the particular field that you're active in um I've seen some comments and rejection letters that say well the journal is not bad but there are like 3 000 other journals and scopus that do the same thing. There's no different angle. There's there's no unique contribution to the field. There's no new bodies of knowledge or being created and therefore they reject the journal based on it doesn't add value to the reader. It's not doing anything that really takes a body of knowledge from here and and and moves It.
Forward in some way or replicates an important finding or so forth so it's subjective it will be um it will be reviewed by the uh the chair the subject chair but again it's a human being. That's making a decision uh about the academic contribution to the field based on their own experience and looking at your Journal so going back to what I said about your home page your web page and the aims and scope the more that we can demonstrate the importance of of our work in our journal. And say this is why this is important. This is why this contributes to this this endeavor of higher education science research scholarly publishing and so forth in my particular field. So the more that you can demonstrate your contribution better it is citations in contrast are the most objective measure so even if your Journal is not yet in scopus it can be cited by papers which are in scopus right so during your Journal which is not in scopus. The papers can be cited by journals which are indexed in scopus. The grading will be from not cited poorly cited fairly cited well-sided extremely well-sided. Um you can go into scopus and check this yourself. You go into the advanced search you can use the operator ref. This means references. It means you are searching in the references of all the papers that are in scopus. I helped um thank Indonesia with the submission of bulletin economy monetary per banken which had two names because they have the Indonesian name have an English name so I searched for ref using the Indonesian name and then using the English name and I saw that there were 101 papers in scopus which are citing this journal which at the time was not in scopus and I thought 100 is pretty good we also saw that this journal is being cited by papers that are affiliated to Indonesia but also to Malaysia and Australia and the United States so there was some diversity in citations so for this aspect sightedness for this journal we thought this is pretty good every time I say this people in the audience ask me Alex how many citations do I need.
I cannot give you an exact number but it is relevant uh to other journals in your field. So if you're in arts and humanities journal or social sciences the expectation is lower than if you're um in engineering or medicine but I can't give you an exact number I would say. 100 is is always a significant number but if it's like 10. I would say 10 for arts and Humanity. Social science is a good start but 10 for the harder. Sciences is is not much the more citations that you can get the better citations. They cannot argue with. It's not subjective if you have 200 citations in scopus from many different countries and from good journals if you see that your citations come from q1 journals for example uh this is really good and it will be hard unless you really have some other problems with your. Journal it will really help you um so driving the the visibility of your journal. A discoverability of your Journal visibility so that people um find the papers read them and cite them is important but of course you have to start with having good quality manuscript and and all of that right visibility won't help you if the content isn't isn't that good so once the quality of what you are accepting is good. The next step is to how do you bring that to an audience and make sure the right people are reading it and potentially citing it so citations are are important. Editors as mentioned editorial board diversity is important but also who are they um they will look at the each person they probably use the home page and they will look are they are they. Prominent researchers they will try to find the scopus profile. If some some editors might not be researcher maybe it's managing editor has a different background. It's okay but it. I think it's good to demonstrate. Why the editorial board you have like what what is it why. Why are those people the editory board right.
What is it that makes these people um qualified so if there's some way to link to have like profile. Pages or something that that um if an evaluator or a person comes and sees this is the editorial report that if it can be more than just a list of names but there can be some information about who they are and it will become more clear why they're on the editorial board you know what qualification they have um I think that's good publishing regularity basically means that you set a schedule and that you keep to the schedule so if you um say that your Journal publishes once a year then you publish once a year steady if you say we published two issues per year published two issues per year study but don't go like two issues this year go back to one issue go to two right once you once you go from one to two you need to consistently deliver two issues they will look at issues that are not published or or serious delays so they're looking for a regular publication schedule that meets what you have said that you will do so if you say oh we have a lot of good manuscripts. We want to go from one to two issues per year. That's good but you need to be able to consistently deliver to issues per year on time while upholding the quality of what you um what you're publishing online availability. The content must be available online in some way so a journal homepage is important um we include both Open Access journals and non-open access journals so if you want if you're not open access you want it to be behind a password. That's fine but it just needs to be available online. The home page must have an option for English language so if your home page is in. Bahasa it's okay but there must also be an option to have some of the key information in English because again your audience if you're saying I want to be in scopus that means your audience is going to expand to an international audience. Um the quality of the home page is being looked at so they're going to check if it's easy to find out what the aims and scope is who's the editory award if they can find your papers if they can easily download the the full text of these things right so F3 Journal must have a very strong Publications and fix malpractices statement.
Attempts because of predatory publishing the pams needs to comprehensively describe the responsibilities and rights of authors and reviewers and editors but also the consequences of misconduct. So you need to not only say for example to authors you cannot plagiarize other people's work you have to also say if you do plagiarize if we if you submit a paper to us and you we determined that it's plagiarized. The consequences will be this or uh if an edit you know so again it's not just the the rights um and responsibilities but also the consequences of misconduct need to be written you can model this around cope right so the the Publications ethics.org hope could give a lot of help um I think it's not too difficult do not copy paste what a different Journal did right so sometimes I see Journal it's like wow they're just copy paste what someone else did you need to write your own right but use some of the the principles that you see that are well executed elsewhere as a as an example another tip a tip so this is not a rule but it's a tip um if you have HTML in your home page and you also have a PDF of the paper that you can download please make sure that the PDF and the HTML are matching sometimes we go to a website and you look at the article in HTML and then you download the PDF and it's two different versions right. The title is different the abstract is different this happens really often. It's an operational thing it's just a mistake so take care that you have the consistency between the HTML version that people can read online and the actual PDF that you're downloading. It is also strongly preferred if the front page the the cover page of the the article includes the journal name volume issue pages the names of the authors very clearly linked to the affiliation where they are working uh we often see papers where it just says the author name and you don't know where they're working right it doesn't say it um it can be it's not a must but it is preferred.
I see people like it. If there is a day to received accepted and reviewed it brings transparency to the peer review process. It's not a criteria not a must but it. I see that it is effective in demonstrating that so it's uh something to think about at least Journal homepage. I've mentioned it a couple times. It is the first place that the csab go. They have a file but they're going to look at the home page so try to make your home page a nice place to go where it's clear where they can find the different pieces of information. Some things that we think should be included on a home page or are the following um. I won't go through them all. I think that Indonesia's web pages are not not too bad that was the Deep dive on all of the criteria. So it's a lot of information. I went through it very quickly and I will give you the slides again. The aims and scope of the journal are a very central part. A lot of the other aspects are evaluated in context of the engine scope. Um don't try to be. International if you're not look at what your strengths are where you can be strong and treat articulate that in a compelling way and look that the editorial board your authors the topics that you publish in all of that kind of meets this aim that you've um that you've set that set out for yourself. I have um collected some acceptance and rejection letters mostly rejection letters before we go there. I wanted to check if there any questions and invite um.