Red alert: Millions of “homeless” publications in Scopus should be resettled

Abstract

Scopus is increasingly regarded as a high-quality and reliable data source for research and evaluation of scientific and scholarly activity. However, a puzzling phenomenon has been discovered occasionally: millions of records with author affiliation information collected in Scopus are oddly labeled as “country-undefined” by Scopus, which is rarely detected in its counterpart Web of Science. This huge number of “homeless” records in Scopus will challenge the reliability of various Scopus-based literature retrieval, analysis and evaluation and therefore is unacceptable for a widely used high-quality bibliographic database. By using data from the past 124 years, this article tries to probe these affiliated but country-undefined records in Scopus. Our analysis identifies four primary causes for these “homeless” records: incomplete author affiliation addresses, Scopus' inability to recognize different variants of country/territory names, misspelled country/territory names in author affiliation addresses, and Scopus' insufficiency in correctly splitting and identifying the clean affiliation addresses. To address this pressing issue, we put forward several recommendations to relevant stakeholders, with the aim of resettling millions of “homeless” records in Scopus and reducing its potential impact on Scopus-based literature retrieval, analysis, and evaluation.