The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Scopus 1900–2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals
Open accessAbstract
Scientometric research often relies on large-scale bibliometric databases of academic journal articles. Long-term and longitudinal research can be affected if the composition of a database varies over time, and text processing research can be affected if the percentage of articles with abstracts changes. This article therefore assesses changes in the magnitude of the coverage of a major citation index, Scopus, over 121 years from 1900. The results show sustained exponential growth from 1900, except for dips during both world wars, and with increased growth after 2004. Over the same period, the percentage of articles with 500+ character abstracts increased from 1% to 95%. The number of different journals in Scopus also increased exponentially, but slowing down from 2010, with the number of articles per journal being approximately constant until 1980, then tripling due to megajournals and online-only publishing. The breadth of Scopus, in terms of the number of narrow fields with substantial numbers of articles, simultaneously increased from one field having 1,000 articles in 1945 to 308 fields in 2020. Scopus’s international character also radically changed from 68% of first authors from Germany and the United States in 1900 to just 17% in 2020, with China dominating (25%).
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Citations
Cites
Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World
Pranckutė, R. (2021) · Publications · doi:10.3390/publications9010012 · Cited by 2,696 · cited 1×
“logical outcome of the standards that journals must meet to be indexed by Scopus (e.g., Baas, Schotten et al., 2020; Gasparyan & Kitas, 2021; Pranckutė, 2021; Schotten, Meester et al., 2017) and the Web of Science (WoS) (Birkle, Pendlebury et al.”
BackgroundThe Journal Coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions: A Comparative Analysis
Singh, V. K., Singh, P., Karmakar, M., Leta, J., & Mayr, P. (2021) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-021-03948-5 · Cited by 2,342
Baas, J., Schotten, M., Plume, A., Côté, G., & Karimi, R. (2020) · Quantitative Science Studies · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00019 · Cited by 2,093
Web of Science as a Data Source for Research on Scientific and Scholarly Activity
Birkle, C., Pendlebury, D. A., Schnell, J., & Adams, J. (2020) · Quantitative Science Studies · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00018 · Cited by 1,283
Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., Orduna-Malea, E., & Delgado López-Cózar, E. (2021) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-020-03690-4 · Cited by 1,018
Self-citationPilkington, A., & Meredith, J. (2009) · Journal of Operations Management · doi:10.1016/j.jom.2008.08.001 · Cited by 537
Dimensions: A competitor to Scopus and the Web of Science?
Thelwall, M. (2018) · Journal of Informetrics · doi:10.1016/j.joi.2018.03.006 · Cited by 294
Self-citationDimensions: Bringing down barriers between scientometricians and data
Herzog, C., Hook, D., & Konkiel, S. (2020) · Quantitative Science Studies · doi:10.1162/qss_a_00020 · Cited by 219
The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900–2007
Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., & Archambault, É. (2009) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.21011 · Cited by 177
Recent Trends in Academic Journal Growth
Gu, X., & Blackmore, K. L. (2016) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-016-1985-3 · Cited by 77
Cited by
Marzi, G., Balzano, M., Caputo, A., & Pellegrini, M. M. (2025) · International Journal of Management Reviews · doi:10.1111/ijmr.12381 · Cited by 577
Metadata
- Authors
- Thelwall, M., & Sud, P.
- Venue
- Quantitative Science Studies
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Published
- 2022
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 37-50
- ISSN
- 2641-3337 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4205332195
- Cited by
- 208
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 21.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Scopus 1900–2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/qss_a_00177
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- Thelwall, M., & Sud, P. (2022). Scopus 1900–2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals. Quantitative Science Studies. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00177
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
