Scopus recently published a new list of journals excluded from its database. This situation became unpleasant news for many researchers, who, unfortunately, published their scientific articles in them. We decided to analyse the work of one of the journals, identify the reasons for its removal from the database, as well as consider the consequences of this situation for the researcher.
For the analysis we took the “Journal of Entrepreneurship Education”, which was excluded. It is one of the journals of the Allied Business Academies publishing house, which publishes journals in the field of business. The official reason for its removal was Publications Concerns. This means that journals for which users, buyers or stakeholders have problems with publishing will be re-evaluated if the claim is found to be legitimate. The journal must be evaluated by the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), after which a decision is made.
We analysed its page in Scopus Preview and saw that the growth of this journal has been steadily increasing over the last two years. It started showing active publishing activity, which significantly differed from previous years. For this, the editorial board increased the number of issues: from 1-2 issues per year (on average 10-25 articles per year) for 20 years to 7 issues in 2019 (167 articles per year). Most likely, such behaviour caused users to ask to study its activities in more detail.
In 2020, two of its issues were published, which did not fall under the indexation, due to the exclusion. Unfortunately, the authors of the articles published in it were unlucky. There is very little chance that issues will still be indexed in the database. Also, analysing the activities of the publishing house, an unfavourable trend can be observed: its journals "took off" that year.
Such situations lead to financial and reputational losses for researchers. In this regard, the question arises as to why publish in questionable journals, spend money, time, and have no guarantees.
Researchers must understand that the choice of a journals for publishing a scientific article should not be left up to chance. This is a serious step; it requires the participation of specialists capable of detecting deviations in the work of the journal at an early stage (selection of the journal for publication) without serious consequences for the researcher.
For many years in scientometrics, Scientific Publications – Publ.Science has accumulated its own database of proven international journals that are its partners, as well as an important experience that helps analyse activity logs and provide our customers with a guarantee indexing of scientific articles. If you need help with the publication of your article, you can contact our specialist on the website to start our cooperation and resolve an issue. As a reminder, we have recently released the material "Detailed analysis of the updated CiteScore formula".
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