How often are Topics updated?

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There are two scenarios when the publications in a Topic can change:

• Publications can be added as part of the weekly Scopus feed
• Publications that are 4 years old are re-evaluated and can move to a more dominant Topic (happens once a year)

Publications as part of the weekly Scopus feed

Every week SciVal receives around 70,000 new publications from Scopus and these publications are assigned a Topic based on the data we have at the time. This means the Topic is allocated to a publication based on its reference list or if there are no references, we use the title and abstract. A publication must have a minimum of at least 1 reference captured by Scopus OR a minimum of 30 words in the title and abstract combined for it to be allocated a Topic. If it does not meet those criteria then we do not have enough metadata to accurately allocate it to a Topic, but instead it is re-evaluated each week until the criteria is met.

Publications that are 4 years old are re-evaluated

Each year, we will assess the papers that were published 4 years earlier to see if we have additional signals (i.e. received citations), that point to the paper being better suited to a different Topic to the one it is currently assigned. In June 2020 we did this for the years 2010 – 2017 to cover the past 10 years. In June 2021 we did this for papers published in 2018.

As a result, we do the following:

• Looked at all papers that are publication year +3 old
• Run an analysis to see how many citation links (cited or citing) they have to their current Topic and their most dominant Topic
• Those publications assigned to a Topic to which they have at least two links and less than 1/3 (or 33%) the links to the dominant Topic would be moved to the dominant Topic.

  • For example a publication has 4 links to its current Topic, but 16 links to the dominant Topic. The current Topic has 25% of the links compared to the dominant Topic, which is less than 33%, so the publication moves to the dominant Topic.
  • If a publication has 4 links to its current Topic, but 8 links to the dominant Topic, it would stay where it is (the link ratio there is 50%, which is therefore higher than 33%).