Alternatives to Scopus

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with the Library Staff who are working behind the scenes on the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Most of the meeting was about reviewing the finances of the journal, so I had a look at the official accounts. These confirmed that the total cost incurred is under $30 per paper. The financial year here at Maynooth runs from October 1st to September 30th – don’t ask me why – so this year is not yet complete but will be just over $5000 dollars. We will have published about 180 papers in that period.

People ask me how the journal can be so inexpensive, and the answer is that we keep publishing costs to a minimum by offering a “no frills” service, and also because our editors and referees are all unpaid.

Anyway, in the course of the meeting I mentioned Scopus (which is owned by publishing behemoth Elsevier). This is used by many universities and funding agencies as a source of bibliometric information, but my experience is that it is unreliable and poorly managed. I thought I would share a few other, better, bibliometric databases here.

We have for some time being indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in fact our articles’ metadata are automatically deposited there every time we publish a paper. This however only covers fully Open Access journals which excludes some journals.

The go-to repository for astrophysicists is the NASA Astrophysics Data System, known to its friends as ADS. This has very complete bibliographic information going back over 100 years, as well as links to catalogues and other supplementary information. It’s also fairly complete for general physics.

Scopus being so awful I was pleased to find a system which is more general than NASA/ADS but with wider coverage. OpenAlex fits the bill rather well. It’s not quite complete but far better than Scopus. Articles from the Open Journal of Astrophysics are index there, and the information is almost as complete as NASA/ADS.

One candidate is Scimago. This is largely concerned with the (in my opinion) pointless task of journal rankings, but the Open Journal of Astrophysics is listed there. Again the information is not totally complete, but it’s not bad.

One thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that if you want to compare the impact of journals or individual articles it’s absolutely essential to use the same source of information because there is a huge variation between databases. When I look at astrophysics articles I always use NASA/ADS, but in other fields you could use OpenAlex or Scimago. There are no circumstances that justify the use of Scopus, even if your boss tells you to…

#DOAJ #NASAADS #NASASAOAstrophysicsDataSystem #OpenAlex #Scimago #SCOPUS

The Threat to the Astrophysics Data System

Many times on this blog (e.g. here) I have mentioned the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System which (for the uninitiated) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 14.0 million records covering publications in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and (of course) the arXiv e-prints. In addition to maintaining its bibliographic corpus, the ADS tracks citations and other information, which means, that among many other things, it is an important tool for evaluating publication impact. I use it very frequently.

I’m not the only person to be worried about this, see e.g. here.

After the Trump administration’s sudden and devasting cuts to Federal science agencies such as the National Science Foundation, it seems very likely that NASA programmes will also be severely cut which calls the future of the ADS system into doubt. This facility is used by astronomers around the world and its loss would have serious consequences for the global research community. I sincerely hope that astronomical organizations around the world will get together and ensure that data is not lost and a replacement website is set up. If your’e an astronomer please put pressure on your national funders to look at this as a matter of agency. We NASA/ADS is a wonderful resource, and is not by any standards expensive to run. We will all regret it if it is lost.

Until about 5 years ago, when ADS underwent a major overhaul, there were mirror sites all around the world. These are all still listed by ADS but do not seem to be functional. At the very least these should be reactivated.

P.S. I have been asked if arXiv is under a similar threat. I don’t believe it is – yet – as it is not run by a Federal organization. We do have secure backups of all OJAp published articles, though, in case you were wondering.

#AstrophysicsDataSystem #NASAADS #Science