Journal Indexing 2: Types & Tips

Journal Indexing helps maintain the ethics and quality in terms of publication and increase visibility, validity, availability, and readership.

As discussed in the previous post, journals can increase their reach and impact by getting their publication “indexed” by one or more leading databases.

Every journal seeks to be named a valid source of scientific information and to be recognized as a prestigious source among many other publications around the globe.

Indexing is a database of scientific journals having a good track record of maintaining the ethics and quality in terms of publication; it is special lookup tables that the database search engine can use to speed up data retrieval.

In addition to the abstract of articles, an index can provide a list of references for each article, thereby allowing for the calculation of the number of citations to each article.

Indexed journals are considered to be of higher quality in comparison to any non-indexed journals. Indexed journals enjoy better visibility and accessibility.

The higher the credibility and the number of these databases, the higher the credibility of the journal indexed in.

To review and examine the international journals in terms of quality and credibility, we need to know the difference between the main indexing agencies.

Indexing Bodies

The Journal indexing agencies take 10 to 180 days to evaluate the journal and approve for indexing. Some indexing has an inquiry form to ask about the indexing stages and proceedings.

There are many indexing bodies to validate a journal, some of which are presented here as the most trusted and popular Journal indexing agencies referred by almost all researchers.

• Google Scholar
• Scopus
• PubMed
• EBSCO
• EMBASE
• DOAJ
• ISI Indexing
• SCIE
• SCIMAGOJR
• OAJI
• IJIFACTOR
• Index Copernicus
• Open J Gate
• Ulrich’s International Periodical Directory
• BASE

In this post, we will study four internationally-acclaimed indexers in various science fields: ISI Indexing, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed.

ISI Indexing

Thomson Reuters is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate that has a number of sub-sets, one of which is the Web of Science Database (WOS).WOS was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and is currently maintained by Clarivate Analytics.  WOS journals provide the following indexes: Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded and recently-added Emerging Sources Citation Index.

The articles that are indexed on this database are popularly known as ISI articles. WOS has two types of journals: one with Impact Factor (JCR Journals) and the other without Impact Factor (ISI Listed Journals). You can refer to this link to make sure a magazine is indexed in Thomson Reuters Institute.

Scopus

Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. It was introduced by Elsevier in 2004 and contains over 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers.

In total, Scopus has indexed 3,500 scientific journals. Scopus is one of Elsevier’s products and using its information requires subscription and payment.

You can refer to this link to make sure a journal is indexed in Scopus.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar was introduced by Google in 2004 and is a very popular alternative data source. It is a database with a special focus on academic articles and patents.

Some academics are skeptical about its wider coverage. However, studies have found most of the citations to be scholarly.

It is limited in functionality compared to the Scopus and Web of Science mainstream academic databases, but it is completely free and you can easily have access to scientific information registered in the Google Scholar search engine. It’s like doing a Google search.

While Scopus and Web of Science restrict their analysis to published journal articles, conferences, and books, Google Scholar will collect its data sources from the entire Internet. After a relatively slow start, Google Scholar coverage is increasing, although Google still does not provide a list of its sources.

PubMed

PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. NCBI is the indexer of PubMed or MEDLINE magazines. PubMed contained 17 million titles by 2008, the oldest of which dates back to 1865. PubMed is a collection of qualitative information from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information and other government agencies and organizations. This database is available for free to the world.

To make sure a magazine is indexed in Pubmed you can visit this link.

For further comparison between these four indexers, see the following table:

Name	Discipline(s)	Access	Provider(s)
Scopus	Multidisciplinary	Subscription	Elsevier
Google Scholar	Multidisciplinary	Free	Google
ISI Indexing	Multidisciplinary	Subscription	Thomson Reuters
PubMed	Biomedical	Free	National Institutes of Health and the US National Library of Medicine

CIKD Journals

IJOL

International Journal of Organizational Leadership is one of the prominent journals of the Canadian Institute for Knowledge Development (CIKD). It publishes open access articles under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The remaining journals offer a choice of licenses.

It has been indexed by the following indexing bodies:

• Thomson Reuters
• EBSCO
• Index Copernicus (ICV 2017: 100.00)
• The European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS)
• ECONBIZ
• Cite Factor
• Research Bible
• ROAD
• Open Academic Journals Index (OAJI)
• SJIF (Scientific Journal Impact Factor)
• MIAR (ICDS= 3.301)
• German National Library of Economics
• Scientific Indexing Services
• Publons
• PIE
• Scholarsteer
• InfoBase Index
• ZDB
• W

MBR

Marketing and Branding Research (MBR) is another journal of CIKD which publish open access articles under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

It has been indexed by the following indexing bodies:

• EconBiz
• ProQuest
• Copernicus ICV 2017= 80.10

Management Issues in Healthcare System

Management Issues in Healthcare System is the third journal of CIKD that publishes empirical quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method and theoretical research articles in the scope of healthcare system management, health policy and planning, strategies, healthcare innovation, and program interventions and related issues which inquire into the emergent and urgent need of the practitioners in the field of the healthcare system.

It has been indexed by the following indexing body:

• • Index Copernicus