Scopus delisting cuts journal articles but not citation impact
Life after delisting: tracking the publication output and citation impact of Scopus-discontinued journals with OpenAlex
Digital Libraries
Summary
Some journals get removed from Scopus when they no longer meet quality standards. The authors studied 514 such journals and found they publish far fewer articles after being removed. However, the number of times other researchers cite the articles they do publish stays about the same. This means that while delisting reduces a journal's popularity for publishing, it does not reduce the impact of the articles already accepted, which raises questions about how research quality and integrity are judged.
What this means in practice
- •For academic publishers: Assess the consequences of journal delisting on publication volume and citation metrics to inform quality control policies.
- •For research library managers: Improve selection and monitoring of indexed journals by understanding output and citation trends after delisting.
Authors
Álvaro Cabezas-Clavijo, Fernando Sánchez-Pita
Abstract
Selective databases such as Scopus periodically re-evaluate the titles they index and remove those that no longer meet their quality criteria. Once a journal is removed, its subsequent output is no longer recorded, and the consequences of this process have therefore received little attention. This study analyzes the publication output and citation impact of 514 sources delisted from Scopus between 2018 and 2024, based on 678,162 documents retrieved from OpenAlex over a window of three years before and after delisting. Differences between periods are tested with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for paired samples, globally and by geographic region, field of knowledge and SJR quartile. Output grows until the year of delisting and falls sharply afterwards. The median annual output per journal drops from 35 to 22 documents (-37.1%; p < 0.001; r = 0.30), 61.7% of journals publish less, and 84 (16.3%) have no documents recorded in OpenAlex after delisting. Citations per document, measured over a three-year window, barely change when each journal is compared with itself (-2.4%; p = 0.079), and journals are almost evenly split between those whose impact falls and those whose impact holds steady or rises. The results indicate that delisting makes these journals less attractive as publication venues but does not penalize the citation of the work they publish to the same extent, which raises concerns from a research integrity perspective.