Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004.

[1] An ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvent in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price.

For this reason, the journals listed in Scopus are considered to meet the requirement for peer review quality established by several research grant agencies for their grant recipients and by degree-accreditation boards in a number of countries.

It has alerting features that allow registered users to track changes to a profile and a facility to calculate authors' h-index.

It provides citation data for all 25,000+ active titles such as journals, conference proceedings and books in Scopus and provides an alternative to the impact factor, a journal-level indicator which may correlate negatively with reliability.

[9] Scopus IDs for individual authors can be integrated with the non-proprietary digital identifier ORCID.

[10] In 2018, Scopus started embedding partial information about the open access status of works, using Unpaywall data.

Since Elsevier is the owner of Scopus and is also one of the main international publishers of scientific journals, an independent and international Scopus Content Selection and advisory board (CSAB) was established in 2009 to prevent a potential conflict of interest in the choice of journals to be included in the database and to maintain an open and transparent content coverage policy, regardless of publisher.

[21] According to Maxim Khan, then the VP of Analytics, Products and Data Platform at Elsevier, Scopus AI provides the following benefits: CiteScore (CS) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal.

This indexing occurred with one citation and four published issues in 2015, which the article suggests does not align with the rules prescribed for other journals.