One of the biggest challenges for scientific journals is indexing in international indexing databases, e.g., Scopus, WoS, and EBSCO. Membership of a journal in such databases enhances the visibility, readability, and availability of articles. Indexing databases are usually classified into three groups, as follows
International general databases, such as Web of Science
Specialized databases, including Embase and MEDLINE
Databases for special locations are regarded as third-level databases, e.g. ISC
It is difficult for a journal to be indexed in databases of grades 1 and 2 since these databases usually involve severe criteria for membership, including:
- Quality of journal:
- All the published articles in a journal should follow the journal guidelines
- The journal should have a clear title and a short name
- Articles should have clear titles and abstracts
- The articles should include the appropriate style of referencing (based on journal guidelines)
- The author’s names and affiliations should be clearly stated in the article.
- The articles should be subjected to peer review
- Ethical issues should be observed in all the articles
- Quality of production
- The articles should be published on time and based on the schedule
- The articles should be designed with proper illustration
- All articles should have DOI codes and CrossMark
You might order DOI for your journal. This order includes the other CrossRef services like CrossMark and Cited by. These services are essential for each journal.
- Scientific content
- The journal should consider the subjects of future conferences
- The scope of the journal should include heated topics (controversy) of the day
- The journal should give priority to original research papers
- The number of original studies should be higher than systematic and case studies
- Linguistic properties:
- Title, abstract, keywords, and references should be in English even if the whole article is written in a non-English article
- The journal should have an English website even if the articles are published in another language, completely separated from the leading website with a different URL
- Variety and diversity
- An article’s reference list should include various authors and researchers.
- Authors with different affiliations should cooperate in writing an article
- The wider the geographic range of authors’ affiliation is, the chance of indexing in higher-ranked archives increases
- The higher engagement of female authors and editorial board is welcomed by many archives.
Specifically, this challenge is for newcomers; the new journals have a bigger challenge. The authors prefer to submit the manuscripts to prestigious journals with a good position in the journal ranking list, like Scimagojr, which belongs to Elsevier. Based on various items, the authors categorize the journals into four quarters from Q1-4, mainly based on the appropriate index in the popular archiving sources. So, a new journal that is not indexed does not receive high-quality submissions and, subsequently, does not get good citations. So, the journals have to start from the lower-ranked archives and, based on the better submissions, gradually but continuously work to get better submissions and apply for indexing in the better archives.
The good news is that forty published articles are enough to apply for Scopus archiving. After publishing this number of high-quality papers, journal managers might apply for this archive. Getting indexed in this archive is key to the publishing world, and then the journal becomes visible enough to be searched and cited.
There is a checklist for indexing your journal. If some items are missing from this list, the editors should not apply. It is important to know that the various archives have different policies, and while some items are the same, others are different among the archiving sources.
Ask our experts to receive the journal indexing checklist.
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