Is Scopus indexing considered reliable?

We regret to inform you that Scopus has discontinued our journal "Nurture" unethically.

We received an email from Scopus on May 8, 2024, informing us that the Nurture journal has been selected for re-evaluation. The email included a link for us to complete the journal information within the next seven days.

Reasons titles added to Re-evaluation program (Radar):

Burst in number of articles published
Changes in the geographical diversity of authors
Shifts in publication topics compared to the journal’s aims and scope

In the online application, the nurture management responded appropriately to the aforementioned comments. We have received the following decision regarding discontinuation on June 4, 2024.

The title mentioned above has been re-evaluated by the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board to determine whether the title meets the content selection standards of Scopus today. The re-evaluation of this title is now complete and it was decided to discontinue the indexing of this title in Scopus.

For your information, the reason for making this decision is:

This seems to be a broad social science journal with a team of editors and large EB based mostly in developing countries and CEE/Russia. Sample papers are recent in 2022 and 2023. Three observations stand out.

First, almost all authors are based in developing countries and/or weak institutions. This is in itself not a problem. But for a journal indexed in Scopus for over a decade now, it's surprising to me that it has not yet attracted papers by authors from a broader range of institutions/countries.
Second, there seems to be a larger number of papers by (Chinese!) authors based in Thailand (Kirk University). This is quite a strange phenomenon.
Third, paper quality is generally weak. Most are run-of-the-mill kind of papers. Several papers have nothing to do with "Nurture" but are purely finance and management papers. Overall, this journal has gone astray in its publishing focus and strategy. Citations also reflect this - only one past paper has 11 citations and the rest of the 190+ papers are all below 10. It's time to discontinue indexing in Scopus.

As a consequence Scopus has stopped coverage of Nurture. In some cases Scopus may have decided to already stop coverage at an earlier stage. In general, all previously indexed content will remain in the Scopus database.

Our publishing manager sent many emails to Scopus and request for reconsideration of decision because “the re-evaluation form given by Scopus to address concerns differs from the parameters used to cancel the indexing of this title in Scopus.”

We had a long conversation with Dr. Wim Meester, Senior Product Manager, Content Strategy and Policy, Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, Netherlands (Click), about Scopus's policies. Dr. Wim Meester told us that appealing to the review evaluation team was the best way to get the decision changed. This is why we filled out the appeal form and sent it to Scopus's re-evaluation team. The Scopus re-evaluation team sent us the following response.

Appeal Decision

Please thank the publishers for pointing out the points they did. But the overall judgement of the subject chair relies on many other considerations which they have not addressed and so a further assessment is very unlikely to change the result.

The Nurture Management has decided to inform the complete situation to the audience of Nurture in the shape of following 4 brief papers:

Discussion between Scopus and Nurture Management on discontinuation policies and arguments with Dr. Wim Meester.
Scopus's ethical policy regarding equal treatment for publisher: With example from Elsevier and other Journals
The Thailand Chinese was subjected to Nurture discontinuation due to the racist mindset of the subject chairs, Julie J. Li and Henry Wai-chung Yeung.
Scopus can exclude 5500 underperforming journals that are only within Scopus, showcasing the world's largest database.

The papers are currently being organized by our team and will be available online within the next few days.