The customer service used to be good
The customer service used to be good, but it seems that they have moved to another country - nothing wrong with that in itself - but the quality dropped. The new "Customer support specialist" have the bad habit to cut all the corners they can in order **not to do** any real job, or sometimes they pretend not to understand the question (one may even think that if they can make more interactions, even fake and/or unnecessary, they get paid more).
Like, you notify them that a citation is missing from your article, they answer something on the line of "everything seems to be fine" and they show you a screenshot of *another* article - I mean, misunderstandings can happen, but they explicitly ask you to refer the title and the **SCOPUS number** of the article in the request, so they should know better.
But the most common answer is a template which apparently is given to them as a universal script, telling the customer that "Scopus captures the paper as per the original publication" and other sentences like that, which are just excuses not to do a thing, sometimes so stubbornly that the time they waste in making up these excuses is just longer than doing the actual job, this is why one can only assume there is something fishy behind this behavior.
Like, if you tell them "Scopus database reports that paper A cites paper B at reference 5, but this is incorrect, the citation is actually to paper C", they send you the standard template above to stand their ground and they tell you "if you feel this is wrong, you should contact the publisher to fix the reference."
Some other times, they separate citations from a certain paper A to your paper (thereby lowering its count) that was published in the "Proceedings of the International conference on Machine learning" because paper A references it as "Proc. ICML" and if you tell them this is actually the same conference (and therefore the same paper), you get... the same answer: "Scopus captures the paper as per the original publication" and they insist that the paper can only be cited as "International Conference on Machine learning" and not ICML despite being the official acronym. But they offer you the solution, which is, once again, "you must contact the original publisher to fix this".
Some small problems with all of that that:
- there is nothing to fix from the publisher's side, the error in on Scopus' side
- the publisher already states on their website that the reference is valid and all that
- anyways, such a claim can be made only by the author of paper A, for obvious reason - it's irrational to ask the publisher to "fix" some papers is not yours
This is so dumb that it would be funny, if only this wasn't the instrument of choice in many internal academic evaluations...