Overview of Journal Indexes and Aggregators

From MPublishing

Once your journal launches, you will want to do everything you can to establish its reputation and raise its profile. One way to do both of these things is to get the journal listed in relevant indexes, aggregators, and databases. Which ones matter most will vary depending on your discipline. This page provides an overview of some of the most important resources, with some basic information about each, including links to review their selection criteria and submit your title for consideration.

[edit] Cabell's

Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities (authentication required) "was founded to help professors, graduate students, and researchers publish their manuscripts in academic journals."

"The Directory helps you to determine which journals typically publish manuscripts similar to yours or could be the best fit for your manuscript. The index in each Directory helps you match the characteristics of your manuscript to the topic areas the journal emphasizes and acceptance rate.

The Directory also includes information on the style and format of most journals to further assist you in organizing and preparing your manuscripts."

Cabell Publishing, Inc. produces directories of publishing opportunities in the following areas: Accounting, Economics and Finance, Management, Marketing, Educational Curriculum and Methods, Educational Psychology and Administration, Educational Technology and Library Science, Psychology and Psychiatry, Computer Science, Health Administration, and Nursing.

[edit] Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

DOAJ "is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals."

[edit] EBSCO

EBSCO "provides a complete and optimized research solution comprised of e-journals, e-books, and research databases." They tend to be more proactive than other indexers at trying to acquire content. According to a phone conversation with them in spring 2013, they can work with OA journals, and will even pay royalties to them, based on how much usage they receive/value they add to EBSCO products. If the editors of the journal do not wish to receive royalties, EBSCO will just as happily not pay them.

Submission form

[edit] Google Scholar

Google Scholar "provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature." Google Scholar does not select or evaluate what to include in the same way that other databases do. Rather, it indexes websites and files that it perceives to be scholarly in nature, based on its content, format, etc. To that end, the best way to ensure that your journal is captured in Google Scholar is to follow the guidelines for webmasters linked below.

Google Scholar uses the h-index to measure productivity and impact of published scholars. They also extend this number to rank journals in terms of impact. Read more about this process here. Journals that published fewer than 100 articles in the window of time used by Google in the analysis are excluded. So a journal may be indexed by Google Scholar, and may be searched and discovered there, but not be listed in their journal rankings because they didn't publish enough articles in a given time period.

One benefit of Google Scholar is that individual authors can track the popularity and impact of their work by logging in with a Google account and setting up their Google Scholar profile.

Inclusion guidelines for webmasters

[edit] International Directory of Philosophy (Philosophy Documentation Center)

The International Directory of Philosophy s an online database containing information on university philosophy departments, professional associations, societies, research centers, journals, and philosophy publishers in the U.S., Canada, and over 130 other countries. The database includes current contact addresses and other available information for over 31,000 philosophers world-wide. Content and features include:

2,800 university departments / programs (graduate & undergraduate)
1,200 journals
420 societies / associations
350 research centers / institutes
700 philosophy publishers
search by name, category, title
search philosophers by specialty
location search by country / city
location seach by state / province (US & Canada)
location results includes map display

(metasearch of all PDC resources

current contact information integrated with author names in E-Collection
limited FREE search
online update option

Submission guidelines

[edit] JSTOR

JSTOR is best known for hosting digitized content from journal back files, along with books and other resources. They now also publish new/current journals, but only work with journals that do not yet have any platform for online publication, or that are willing to move their whole journal to be published solely on the JSTOR platform.

In short, JSTOR prefers to host content, rather than simply indexing and linking to it. The exception seems to be, for journals that make content available in JSTOR after an embargo of three years or so, JSTOR will link out to the most recent issues on the publishers website. However, they will not simply index a journal that lives entirely on another platform.

Current journals program
Archival journals selection criteria.
Links to the submission form are available on each of the pages above. The form does not seem to have a stable URL of its own.

[edit] MedLine

MedLine belongs to the National Library of Medicine and is primarily focused on indexing biomedical literature. There is not exactly a 1:1 relationship between MedLine and PubMed Central. They are not exactly the same thing. However, everything in MedLine is included in PubMed, so MedLine content is generally made available to the public through the PubMed interface.

Likewise, when searching for how to get a journal indexed by PubMed, the selection criteria for MedLine keep coming up.

Special Notes:MedLine cares more about aesthetics and quality of the journal itself than do many other indexes. For example, they care about the quality of graphics and illustrations. They also prefer (but do not require) that journals with a print component be printed on archival, acid-free paper. Electronic journals must be preserved in an approved repository or in an approved system (e.g. PubMed, CLOCKSS)

[edit] Project Muse

Project Muse indexes humanities and social sciences content, including journals--however, they will not index journals that are available for free elsewhere on the web, because they don't want to charge libraries for something they can get for free. They also do not include journals published by for profit companies.

[http://muse.jhu.edu/about/publishers/before_submitting.html Selection criteria
Submission form

[edit] PsycInfo

Published by the American Psychological Association, PsycInfo "is an expansive abstracting and indexing database with more than 3 million records devoted to peer-reviewed literature in the behavioral sciences and mental health, making it an ideal discovery and linking tool for scholarly research in a host of disciplines."

[edit] Scopus

Scopus is owned by Elsevier. It calls itself "the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature."

Scopus includes scholarship from across all disciplines and offers journal analytics using several different measures.

Special Notes: Scopus requires that the journal have a publication ethics and malpractice statement.

[edit] Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Web of Knowledge

The Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge/Web of Science is (self) described as "the world's largest collection of research data, publications, and patents." This database is used to determine the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a proprietary number assigned to each journal based on how frequently articles from the last two years are cited in newly published scholarship. JIFs, along with other information, are published each year in Journal Citation Reports. Web of Knowledge covers scholarship in all disciplines, though JIF tends to be more important in the sciences (and especially health sciences) than in other fields. Thomson also has domain-specific sub-databases (such as BIOSIS) that draw from the Web of Knowledge. A journal must first be in the Web of Knowledge in order to be represented into one of the sub-databases.

Special notes: Timeliness of publication is essential. Journals under consideration must submit three consecutive new issues to Web of Knowledge as they are published, to demonstrate that they stick to their schedule. (Journals that publish articles one at a time must submit all new content to Web of Knowledge as it is published, over a 9 month period. Journals that do not meet the basic timeliness criteria will not be evaluated further at all for inclusion.

[edit] Ulrich's Knowledgebase/Ulrichsweb

Ulrichsweb "helps librarians and patrons avoid the frustration and time-consuming process of gathering serials information in bits and pieces from multiple sources." It is owned by SerialSolutions/Proquest.

FAQ
To report a journal that is not currently represented, send an email to [1]. In your email, include the name of the publication and any other information you may know about that publication such as the name of the publisher or the provider who makes it available. An editor will follow up with the publisher or provider and attempt to get the most recent information about the publication.