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<p>This study investigates whether advertisements featured in scholarly journals are indexed as scholarly document types in Scopus. Using <i>Current Science</i> as a case study, all records indexed between 1993 and 2024 (as of August 1, 2024), with an additional update on February 20, 2026, were examined, yielding 17,870 records in total. Title-based screening followed by structural assessment identified 60 advertisement displays that had been indexed primarily as ‘Article’ or ‘Note,’ the majority of which were published during the last decade. These items consisted mainly of recruitment and fellowship announcements and lacked core scholarly features such as abstracts, references, and research content. Although the overall proportion of such records is small, their inclusion under core scholarly document types raises concerns about document-type integrity and the reliability of bibliometric indicators derived from large-scale databases. The findings suggest that selective mis-indexing of non-scholarly content may occur within automated metadata ingestion workflows. By providing the first empirical evidence of advertisements being indexed as scholarly documents in a major bibliographic&#xa0;database, the study contributes to ongoing discussions on metadata quality, boundary definition, and the evaluative soundness of bibliographic infrastructures.</p>

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Mis-indexing advertisements as scholarly documents in Scopus: empirical evidence of document-type misclassification

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月2日

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  • Bakthavachalam Elango

摘要

This study investigates whether advertisements featured in scholarly journals are indexed as scholarly document types in Scopus. Using Current Science as a case study, all records indexed between 1993 and 2024 (as of August 1, 2024), with an additional update on February 20, 2026, were examined, yielding 17,870 records in total. Title-based screening followed by structural assessment identified 60 advertisement displays that had been indexed primarily as ‘Article’ or ‘Note,’ the majority of which were published during the last decade. These items consisted mainly of recruitment and fellowship announcements and lacked core scholarly features such as abstracts, references, and research content. Although the overall proportion of such records is small, their inclusion under core scholarly document types raises concerns about document-type integrity and the reliability of bibliometric indicators derived from large-scale databases. The findings suggest that selective mis-indexing of non-scholarly content may occur within automated metadata ingestion workflows. By providing the first empirical evidence of advertisements being indexed as scholarly documents in a major bibliographic database, the study contributes to ongoing discussions on metadata quality, boundary definition, and the evaluative soundness of bibliographic infrastructures.