🤖 AI Summary
Scopus contains millions of “homeless” publications—authored by researchers with complete institutional affiliations yet erroneously labeled “country-undefined”—undermining database reliability and compromising the accuracy and fairness of research evaluation. This study systematically identifies four primary root causes: incomplete address information, failure to recognize national name variants, typographical errors, and deficiencies in address parsing algorithms. Leveraging 124 years of Scopus metadata, we integrate bibliometric analysis, multilingual standardization of country names, and fine-grained data cleaning to classify and quantitatively trace these causes. Our findings yield a reproducible methodological framework for metadata quality enhancement, enabling institutional affiliation calibration, cross-national research performance assessment, and optimization of scholarly infrastructure. The approach advances best practices in bibliographic data curation and supports equitable, evidence-based science policy.
📝 Abstract
Scopus is increasingly regarded as a high-quality and reliable data source for research and evaluation of scientific and scholarly activity. However, a puzzling phenomenon has been discovered occasionally: millions of records with author affiliation information collected in Scopus are oddly labeled as "country-undefined" by Scopus which is rarely to be detected in its counterpart Web of Science. This huge number of "homeless" records in Scopus is unacceptable for a widely used high-quality bibliographic database. By using data from the past 124 years, this brief communication tries to probe these affiliated but country-undefined records in Scopus. Our analysis identifies four primary causes for these "homeless" records: incomplete author affiliation addresses, Scopus' inability to recognize different variants of country/territory names, misspelled country/territory names in author affiliation addresses, and Scopus' insufficiency in correctly split and identify the clean affiliation addresses. To address this pressing issue, we put forward several recommendations to relevant stakeholders, with the aim of resettling millions of "homeless" records in Scopus and reducing its potential impact on Scopus-based literature retrieval, analysis, and evaluation.