Creating a collection of publications categorized by their research guarantors into the Scopus ASJC scheme

Abstract

Given the need in Scientometrics to get beyond merely classifying scientific production based on the classification of the journals in which it is published, there have been many attempts to classify papers directly. Little has been done, however, to check how reliable the results are. In this work, a collection of publications was generated which we call an Author’s Assignation Collection (AAC) comprising 13449 papers referenced in the Scopus database and classified by their research guarantor with fractional weighting in terms of Scopus’s own ASJC scheme. The methodological approach taken is described, and the collection’s representativeness is evaluated and compared with the journal-based classification. There stand out both the great number of papers assigned by their research guarantors to more than one category (at times with even the same weight) and how frequently authors assigned categories which were not assigned to the journals in which their paper was published.