Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 490.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2019-12-12 09:03:30+00:00
        From: Miran Hladnik 
        Subject: Indexing problems with non-Latin scripts

The following will hardly spark sympathy among English speaking
members of Humanist. But maybe it should, concerning that the word
humanist indicates also a person respecting human dignity. It is about
respecting other scripts and languages.

Some months ago a Russian author in the journal I edit noticed that
his paper hadn't been indexed by Elsevier Scopus. Being aware that
articles and references in the Cyrillic script cause indexing problems
with Scopus, the journal sticks to the instructions from the Scopus
officials and transliterates every single Cyrillic entry into the
Latin script. In spite of that the references were not indexed. I've
intervened with Scopus. After a while I received the astonishing answer 
from the content account manager: The paper cannot be processed because 
the references are not in English! The new demand and the argument by
Scopus sound like mocking: it would be unacceptable for a resarch
paper to list the titles in a non-existing English translation instead
of in original languages. Our journal publishes predominantly
non-English papers, nevertheless it has been successfully processed by
the same institution so far. The problem seems to be burning only
regarding the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, which evidently disturbs
some Scopus employees and raises suspicion, that someone is after
expelling Russian out of the scientific community to maintain the
dominance of English.

I would appreciate your indexing experience with other languages and
with non-Latin scripts, e. g. Hebrew or Greek. Apart from this, it
seems necessary to tell, that in the times when every mobile device is
capable of recognizing and translating a text of a deliberate script
and language, the terror of English exercised by Elsevier Scopus is
discriminating and indecent. -- miran hladnik
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miran_Hladnik)





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