Dear VectMag Community:
This post's purpose is to create awareness to dispel certain myths about SCOPUS indexing. There has been a lot of misinformation and lack of understanding amongst the authors and organizers. We will try to go through each and every aspect of how indexing happens, basics of publishing styles & format etc. Lets go through them step by step.
Proceedings with ISBN
Several publishers across the world publish conference proceedings as a book. When the proceedings are published as a book usually two things happen (a) First a hard / print copy is published; (b) The e-book is created for online publication, however some publishers do not create e-book without printing the hard copies first.
Highly reputed publishers follow this model, which includes:
Taylor & Francis- CRC Press and Routledge.
Springer- (barring a few exceptions)
Oxford Publishers
Kluwer Academic Press
Apple Academic Press
De Gruyter academic publishing
River Publishers
The time cycle for all these publishers vary typically between 4 months to 8 months. In rare cases this may go up to18 months!
This was a very normal thing to happen before some publishing houses switched to purely digital library mode.
Proceedings with ISSN
New age publishers switched towards e-books and fast publishing model to a significant extent driven by economic interests. These include reputed one's like:
IEEE Xplore digital library
Elsevier's- Materials Today Proceedings, Computer Science Proceedia etc.
E3S web of conferences
The Series model
This kind of model relies on the SCOPUS content suggester policy. Where it is mandatory that the publisher and conference organizers rely on creating a series of the same conference. Typically three times at regular intervals, this is the model followed by publishers like the SCITEPress.org ( SCITE Press Digital Library).
Initially an ISBN is generated for the first volume of the first conference. Then at the second and third conference the ISSN is generated, please keep in mind that the publisher continues to generate ISBN.
Only at the third conference of the same the SCOPUS will consider it as a series and accepts the articles of all three conferences for indexing.
If the outcome of the indexing evaluation is successful, the SCOPUS will index the conference series as "Source Indexing".
Note: "Source Indexing" implies that the conference itself is now SCOPUS indexed and the articles of the previous volumes of the conference shall be indexed as well as all future volumes of the conference shall also be indexed as long as the quality norms are followed.
The Source Indexing model being followed for:
AI4IoT series conferences
PAMIR series conferences
At the same time, we at VectMag are building our own proceedings in the form of SPAST Reports that shall follow the ISSN model. You can read about it here
As per the latest trends being followed by SCOPUS, due to extreme backlog in their indexing they have decided to distribute load between Engineering Village aka EI compendex
Engineering Village Website: https://www.engineeringvillage.com/home.url?redir=t
Many of you will be amazed to know the Engineering Village is also owned by Elsevier which also owns SCOPUS. In turn Elsevier is owned by RELX Group which is a UK based MNC which primarily is an Information Technology and Analytics Company.
So how Indexing is working now?
Recently several publishing houses have received clarifications from Elsevier that all proceedings with an ISBN will have to come through Engineering Village for indexing first. If the proceedings book that contains the ISBN has been accepted by Engineering Village or EI Compendex indexing then it is automatically reflected in SCOPUS database.
For Proceedings with ISSN the indexing will be directly done by SCOPUS and then it will be reflected in EI compendex / Engineering Village.
Time cycle: 3 to 6 months post online publication of the content
Unfortunately, some of our books were caught in this shift of policies and hence we are expecting longer than expected time cycles.
Our solution to this delay
Please be advised that we are not a decision maker at SCOPUS. Neither are we anyway associated with SCOPUS nor are the publishing houses are the decision makers of SCOPUS so we can not force SCOPUS to hurry up the indexing cycle. To bypass this issue we came up with a better solution of Special Issues in Journals. You see after each volume is published the SCOPUS and SCI automatically indexes the published content of each volume. Therefore the wait period is quite low in this case, even then it takes about a month.
One has to keep in mind that SCOPUS by itself is nothing, its just a database just like SCI.
Here is our solution for all our authors:
Step 1: | Publish proceedings article of no more than 2500 words. |
Step 2: | Publish an extended version of the same in any of the special issues or special series of the journals associated with us. |
By following the above two steps you are assured that you still will end up with one SCOPUS article in the worst case scenario and with two SCOPUS articles in the best case scenario.
Write to us for queries: office@vectmag.com
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