SoTL and Scopus
This week I enjoyed a conversation on the topic of journal rigor and reputation, which of course Scopus was mentioned. As a reminder, Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature including scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. This database shares a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in many fields. As my goal in these blogs is to share research for faculty to use in their decision-making, I thought sharing more information on Scopus, particularly as it relates to SoTL might be helpful. You can find a helpful article summarizing Scopus here.
First, I would like to share that above all, the criteria that we should be considering in our career is how we are assessed, measured and evaluated in our current role. For those early career tenure-line faculty, there is almost always guidance from departments on acceptable scholarship at their institutions. Some faculty handbooks refer to databases such as Scopus as a way to measure rigor. I am not endorsing this approach or any particular list, but that each of us need to attend to regional requirements, and then perhaps revisit our research agenda and even our goals for future positions to ensure that our efforts align with next step career expectations.
There are many reputable journals that are not indexed with Scopus and use other databases, which include Eric, DOAJ, EBSCO, Crossref, etc. Again, identifying the index that supports your academic area and career path will be the most helpful.
In May 2020, I shared a blog post on possible ways to publish SoTL research, which included a list of higher ed teaching conferences and SoTL journals. There are over 40,000 journals indexed in Scopus, although only 5000 are OER (13.4%) and of those only 280 (0.6%) relate to SoTL. For those who would like to publish in SoTL journals who are Scopus indexed AND are open source, here are some examples:
