I'm not too sure what is the right way to use this tag, but I use it like this:
<sourceFileExcludes>
<exclude></exclude>
<exclude></exclude>
</sourceFileExcludes>
It doesn't work at all. It seems that there was a known bug in maven that this tag won't work as I found these threads: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26223872/3209177
But that was a while ago. I didn't find much useful information on maven website as well.
So how can we exclude certain source files / classes while we build javadoc using maven?