The development of the SCOPUS Content Selection Advisory Board, 2003-2009

Since the work of Eugene Garfield in the 1960s, the science of bibliometrics has come to dominate behaviours across academic publication worldwide. Bibliometrics is primarily the preserve of two companies which have invested substantially in their modern digital systems: Clarivate Analytics, which owns the Web of Science, which evolved from Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI); and Elsevier BV, which has developed the SCOPUS system since the early 2000s. Academic journal numbers have surged over two decades, in consequence of the worldwide demand from academia; and of open access and digital publishing, and of the global reach of the Internet. SCOPUS and Web of Science employ advisory boards to help manage the accreditation of journals by their systems on grounds of the quality and trustworthiness of the content, which now includes the development of defences against global publication malpractice. I have been privileged to act within this complex system as the Subject Chair for Medicine to the SCOPUS Content Selection Advisory Board (CSAB) since 2009. In this Working Paper, I describe the creation of the SCOPUS CSAB as the prelude to a series of essays on the insights and global challenges in quality assurance which flow from this unique project