Papers › A logical set theory approach to journal subject classification analysis: intra-system...
A logical set theory approach to journal subject classification analysis: intra-system irregularities and inter-system discrepancies in Web of Science and Scopus
Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Journal classification into subject categories is an important aspect in scholarly research evaluation as well as in bibliometric analysis. However, this classification is not standardized, resulting in several different journal subject classification systems. In this study, we adopt a logical set theory-based definition of irregularities within a given classification system and discrepancies between systems and investigate their prevalence in the two most widely used indexing services of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In both systems, we identify unusually sized categories, high overlap and incohesiveness between categories. In addition, across the two systems, journals are systematically classified to a different number of categories and most categories in either system are not adequately represented in the other system. Our findings suggest that these irregularities and discrepancies are, in fact, non-anecdotal and thus cannot be easily disregarded. Consequently, potentially misguided and/or inconsistent outcomes may be encountered when relying on these subject classification systems.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections