How to Check Whether a Journal Is Indexed in Scopus
A journal's own website saying “Scopus indexed” is not evidence — nobody polices that sentence. The only authoritative source for Scopus coverage is the official source list Elsevier publishes, and that list separately marks titles that have been DISCONTINUED. This guide shows how to verify Scopus indexing by ISSN and which traps to watch for.
Why the journal's own claim is not enough
“Scopus indexed”, “applied to Scopus” and “under evaluation by Scopus” mean very different things, yet publisher sites present them with the same badge. Having applied is not being indexed: an article published in a journal still under evaluation will not appear in Scopus.
The second problem is subtler. A journal may genuinely have been indexed once and later been dropped from coverage. The site does not remove the old badge, and it can keep saying, quite truthfully, that it “has been indexed in Scopus”. What matters to you is not the past but whether YOUR article will be indexed when it is published.
The authoritative source: Elsevier's official source list
The only binding source for Scopus coverage is the Scopus Source List that Elsevier publishes and updates. It carries the journal title, ISSN, coverage years and whether the title has been discontinued. Journal Check uses this list, and when the record it finds has been dropped from coverage it raises a separate warning.
Discontinuation is important enough to be its own signal: “Elsevier's official list marks this journal as discontinued in Scopus — new articles published there will not be indexed in Scopus.” That sentence is not a judgement about the journal's quality; it is a warning about the outcome of your submission.
Verify by ISSN, never by title
- Journal titles collide: dozens of journals share near-identical names, one indexed and another not.
- Hijacked sites copy a real journal's name and appearance exactly; the ISSN is often the only distinguishing field.
- A journal can hold two ISSNs, print (p-ISSN) and electronic (e-ISSN) — try both.
- Take the ISSN from an article's citation or from the official ISSN Portal, not from the journal's own website.
- If the ISSN does not appear in the official ISSN Portal at all, that alone is a serious warning sign.
Coverage years: “indexed” does not hold for every year
Scopus coverage is defined as year ranges. A journal may have been indexed from 2012 to 2019 and dropped in 2020. An article published there today is not indexed, even though it is perfectly true that the journal “was in Scopus”.
The same distinction matters even more for conference proceedings: some years of a conference series may be indexed while others are not. Conference Check makes that year-by-year distinction explicitly.
Step by step
- 1. Take the journal's ISSN from an article citation or the ISSN Portal.
- 2. Enter the ISSN in Journal Check; the record is looked up in the Scopus source list.
- 3. Read the coverage years: does your intended publication year fall inside them?
- 4. If a “discontinued” warning appears, past indexing is irrelevant to you.
- 5. Compare the badge on the journal's site with the list record; where they disagree, the list wins.
- 6. Record the result against the ISSN, not the title.
Verify your journal by ISSN
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