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.

Contents 1 Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Web of Knowledge 2 Scopus 3 MedLine 4 PsycInfo 5 EBSCO 6 JSTOR 7 Project Muse

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.

• Selection criteria and evaluation process
• Submission form

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.

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.

• Selection criteria
• A General Introduction to SCOPUS and the Work of the Content Selection and Advisory Board
• Submission form

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

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.

• Policy on indexing electronic journals
• General journal selection FAQ
• Requirements for electronic journals FAQ
• Submission form

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)

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."

• Selection criteria
• Submission guidelines and documents

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

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 it own.

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]