Ranking of the subject areas of Scopus

Here, we show a longitudinal analysis of the ranking of the subject areas of Elsevierʹs Scopus. To this aim, we present three summary measures based on the journal ranking scores for academic journals in each subject area. This longitudinal study allows us to analyze developmental trends over times in different subject areas with distinct citation and publication patterns. We evaluate the relative performance of each subject area by using the overall prestige for the most important journals with ranking score above a given threshold (e.g., in the first quartile) as well as the overall prestige gap for the less important journals with ranking score below a given threshold (e.g., below the top 10 journals). Thus, we propose that it should be possible to study different subject areas by means of appropriate summary measures of the journal ranking scores, which provide additional information beyond analyzing the inequality of the whole ranking-score distribution for academic journals in each subject area. It allows us to investigate whether subject areas with high levels of overall prestige for the first quartile journals also tended to achieve low levels of overall prestige gap for the journals below the top 10.