What is Scopus journal percentile?

Scopus is a unified abstract and bibliographic database that includes scientific literature. Scopus was created by Elsevier Publishing, which provides access through a special institutional subscription.

The interest in this database is obvious and not accidental. For specialists who have an academic degree, it is important to publish their scientific materials in the relevant publications that are in this database. But being in Scopus itself is not a sufficient condition for a scientific journal to be relevant for publication. The publication must have an appropriate rating in SiteScore and percentile. Otherwise, the article will not be taken into account. Therefore, it is very important to understand such indicators in order to be able to select a publication for publishing your scientific materials as correctly as possible.

Percentiles and quartiles

Let's first look at the terminology in its basic understanding, and then move on specifically to the Scopus database and examples of analysis of the necessary indicators.

The term "percentile" refers to a measure in which the percentage of total values is equal to or less than the measure. For example, 90 percent of the data values are below the 90th percentile. Or 10 percent of the data values are below the 10th percentile. As for quartiles, these are values that divide the data table into four parts. This is a general notation for concepts. Now let's consider it in relation to the Scopus database.

1. 25% — Q1, 1st quartile, 99-75th percentiles;
2. 25% — Q2, II quartile, 74-50 percentiles;
3. 25% — Q3, III quartile, 49-25 percentiles;
4. 25% — Q4, IV quartile, 24-1 percentiles.

If we take this scheme into account, then it is not so difficult to navigate the structure of the Scopus database. Now we will move on to examples of how this looks in practice in a more detailed form. But first, let's consider another important issue.

In which case the journal does not calculate percentile

Percentile in Scopus is not calculated in the following situations:

• when a scientific journal was accepted into Scopus earlier than 3 years ago. In this case, everything is quite understandable, since there is not enough data for the calculation;
• when a scientific journal was excluded from Scopus.

In all other situations, such an indicator can be calculated without any problems.

How to determine the quartile of a scientific journal by percentile

Although some of the definitions may seem complicated at first glance, in practice they are quite easy to understand. Each subject category to which a scientific journal belongs has its own gradation. According to the AJSC classification, all journals within a category are ordered by the descending principle of the CiteScore indicator. Let's look at a specific example. Let's assume that we are dealing with the 86th percentile. This means that the scientific journal belongs to the 14% (86 must be subtracted from 100) of publications with the highest CiteScore value in a particular field.

And, of course, this answer will be incomplete if we do not consider what the CiteScore concept in Scopus is based on. In simple terms, CiteScore is a rating that a scientific journal has in the Scopus database. The formation of this indicator takes into account how many documents were cited during the year (we are talking about documents published in the previous 3 years). This indicator is then divided by the number of documents that were indexed in Scopus and published during the same period.

By the way, there is another important aspect when a scientific journal is related to several areas in Scopus at once. In such cases, you can see that in each such area the journal has its own percentile. Accordingly, the highest of them is selected. This will be the final percentile of the scientific journal in Scopus.

To sum it up…

For all professionals who have a scientific or academic degree, understanding the information described in this article is essential to be able to use the Scopus database effectively. For each such expert in their field, it is important to have two scientific materials in the form of an article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal of international level, which is in the Scopus database. But this is not the only requirement. The SiteScore percentile must be at least 35 in one of the scientific fields.

As for the military, specialists of higher military institutions, scientific organizations or special educational institutions, there is a slightly different requirement. There must be 3 scientific articles, the percentile of which in Scopus has a value of at least 50.

Let's look at an example. If we are talking about a holder of an academic degree, then a scientific journal for publishing materials does not meet the requirements when his percentile in each of the database areas is less than 35. For example, the value 37 in Scopus is suitable, but 34 is not.

Understanding these mechanisms allows you to use the Scopus database effectively.