Script & Print Indexed by Scopus

As many of you will know, Scopus is an abstract and citation database that is much-favoured by the authors of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative of June 2008. At the prompting of the editor, Script & Print has been reviewed by Scopus, and has now been accepted for addition by the Content Selection and Advisory Board.

What this means is that articles published in S&P will be indexed by Scopus as soon as they are issued. S&P will thus be in a highly-privilaged position. Few Humanities journals are indexed by Scopus and Thomson ISI and the coverage of book history titles is a long way from complete.

Scopus contains The Library [0024-2160] and Studies in Bibliography [0081-7600] (listed as "discontinued"); but does not contain: Book History [ISBN 1098-7371], The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America [0006-128X] or Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada [0067-6896]. Thomson ISI's 2001–2007 Journal Citation Reports "Social Science Edition" do not contain any of these titles at all.

So, despite the scale of these indexing services (Thomson ISI and Scopus index approximately 15,000 journals between them), Book Historians will be seriously disadvantaged if the enthusiasm for bibliometrics in Canberra (journal rankings, citation benchmarks and centile analysis) prompts the imposition of a bibliometric valuation of the work of Australian scholars.

The good news is that, if the value of an article is to be judged by the frequency with which it is cited by other scholars (scholars, that is, whose work is indexed by Scopus and Thompson ISI), the indexing of S&P by Scopus will ensure that the work of Australian Book Historians will be counted, and will have some chance of being properly valued.

We can only hope that abstract and citation database expand to include more of the journals in which the work of Book Historians is discussed.