Scopus has completed its reevaluation of MDPI’s journal Sustainability and will continue to index the title, according to the publisher.
As Retraction Watch previously reported, Scopus, a product of Elsevier, had paused indexing articles from Sustainability at the end of October while reevaluating whether to include the journal. Removal from the index can lead to a decline in submissions because universities and funders use Scopus to create journal “whitelists.”
The reevaluation process concluded January 4, according to Stefan Tochev, CEO of MDPI.
“Following this evaluation, it has been determined that Sustainability meets Scopus’s content selection standards,” Tochev said. The content that was not indexed during the reevaluation will be added to Scopus within the next 4 weeks.
We asked Elsevier for comment on Scopus’ decision, and a spokesperson responded:
The review was done according to the regular Scopus quality criteria and the decision was made to continue coverage by Scopus. Details about the journal review are confidential.
As we have noted:
In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023.
…
The number of articles from Sustainability indexed in Scopus has increased nearly every year since 2009, its first year of coverage, when 78 articles were indexed. In 2022, the journal published over 17,000 articles. Scopus indexed about 13,500 in 2023, before the pause.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.
Typo: reevaluating *rather,* should be whether.
Fixed, thanks.
Great news for the Sustainability contributors around the world.
Yes absolutely.
A high quality reserch is published in this journal.
the whole review system is a joke in todays digital ai age. Scopus should tell all journals that they cant increase total paper next year by more than 20%. Automatically problems will get solved of predatory journals . AI can immediately suspend a journal in scopus if papers are more than 20% from previous year
I love it when someone that completely misunderstands AI defends it. To set a 20% threshold, you don’t need AI at all. Sigh
Good point!
I sincerely hope our research policymakers note this turnoaround and stop building various floating barriers.
New comments on the Sustainability articles in Pubpeer made by Magazinov:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8B55FFE43BB292B951DC8C39765566#1
https://pubpeer.com/publications/780BB5941935BBE29C6C425B28210B#3
We conclude that Sustainability is a descent journal until the next notice.
The response by Scopus and their process of indexing journals is biased towards a business model that hurts science and open-access. They can make all the noise that they want about how clean and good both are, even the readers here, but at the end, we all know that this Journal is predatory and that SCOPUS is crooked.
MDPI publishes articles which should never be considered research articles. It is hurting Research and allowing low quality academics to progress in their career . Shame on Scopus for supporting all this.
First, the claim of 20% is faulty. Academics/Researchers are increasing by the day so, putting a ceiling is unfounded.
Second, SCOPUS, in my view is also not perfect. I something feel a sense of bias in some of the journals in SCOPUS as well – colour/country/tribe/institution/location to say the least.
More so, my experience with MDPI Sustainability is crazy in the reviewing process. I almost lost it.
Overall, the fact that you’ve got a rejection based on the aforementioned concerns, a more objective outlet should not be considered as predatory.
I found out that my work was plagiarized by a group of people and published it in Sustainability. I have contacted them and provided all the information, including my institution’s resolution. However, 8 months have passed and I see no progress, I asked the journal but get very vague responses. How long should a retraction take? Should I be informed about the retraction statement? What happened if the authors don’t agree with the retraction?
My experience was that our paper submitted to Sustainability got very thorough reviews from even more than two reviewers. We completed the changes requested but in the second round, we were rejected by one reviewer (the one that least understood the software tool we used). The paper was rejected. However, a few days later the editor approached us to say that we could resubmit it as a ‘new’ submission and that it would go to different reviewers. However, by then the bomb about MDPI allegedly ‘being predatory’ exploded on the scene. We withdrew the paper.
The take-away: we received proper peer review comments from multiple reviewers. The fact that MDPI pressurises the authors and reviewers to do the reviews and the changes in a very short period do not necessarily invalidate the fact that proper peer review did take place. The question is whether it is appropriate to offer ‘rejected’ authors another chance. It could be that MDPI reject papers early in the review to artificially make their time-to-decision as short as possible and then offer declined papers another peer review as a ‘new’ submission. Or they could be chasing the money. But still, we had proper peer review…