Scopus: the Content Selection and Advisory Board
Titles are evaluated by an independent board of subject experts, the Content Selection and Advisory Board, rather than by Elsevier staff alone. A journal must first clear minimum eligibility requirements — peer review, English-language abstracts and titles, regular publication to a stated schedule, references in Roman script, and a publicly available publication-ethics statement.
Eligible titles are then scored on categories that Elsevier publishes openly: journal policy, including the type of review and the diversity of the editorial board; content quality and contribution to the field; the journal’s citedness in Scopus; regularity of publication; and online availability, including the quality of the English-language homepage.
The process is genuinely selective, and a rejected title faces an embargo before it can reapply. This is why "applied to Scopus" or "under evaluation for Scopus" on a journal website means nothing at all for a paper you submit today.
Evaluation is by an independent board against published criteria. "Under evaluation" is not coverage.
Web of Science: quality criteria, then impact criteria
Clarivate operates a two-stage model for the Core Collection. A title is first assessed against a set of quality criteria covering editorial rigour and best practice — among them ISSN registration, a clear peer-review policy, ethics statements, complete bibliographic information in English, a named and contactable editorial board, and content that is genuinely scholarly.
Titles meeting those criteria are admitted to the Emerging Sources Citation Index. A further set of impact criteria — essentially comparative citation performance within the subject area — governs whether a journal moves into the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index or the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
That distinction matters for authors. ESCI coverage is real Web of Science coverage, but ESCI journals did not historically receive a Journal Impact Factor, and some institutional assessment frameworks treat the collections differently. If someone is going to assess your paper, find out which collection they mean.
Coverage is reviewed, and it can be withdrawn
Neither database treats acceptance as permanent. Both re-evaluate titles and discontinue those that stop meeting the criteria, most commonly for publication concerns, editorial standards falling away, or citation behaviour that looks manipulated.
The practical consequence is a trap authors fall into repeatedly: a journal that was indexed when the paper was submitted may not be when it is published, and indexing is not applied retroactively to issues published outside the coverage window.
Check coverage at the moment you submit, and again before you pay any fee. Our page on what happens when a journal is delisted from Scopus covers where that leaves a paper already published there.
What this means when you are choosing a journal
Read the criteria as a checklist you can apply yourself. A named editorial board with institutional affiliations you can verify, a stated review model, a published ethics statement, issues that appear on schedule and a functioning English homepage are exactly what the evaluators look for — and their absence is exactly what should stop you submitting.
Be sceptical of any metric you have not heard of. Names built to resemble Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor are fabrications with no standing at either database, and a journal advertising one has told you something useful about itself.
Where a title genuinely is covered, note which index, which subject category and which years. Those three facts are what an assessment committee will ask for, and they are the ones authors most often cannot produce.