Indexing claims are where academic publishing is least honest. Logos appear on journal sidebars for services the journal has never been evaluated by. "Indexed in" gets used to mean everything from a formal database inclusion to "our articles show up in a web search". Authors are asked to make submission decisions on the basis of badges that mean nothing.
So this article does something slightly unusual: it states what our content genuinely reaches, states plainly what it does not, and shows you how to check every line without trusting us.
First, what "indexed" actually means
The word covers three quite different things, and conflating them is how the misleading claims work.
| Type | What it involves | Is it selective? |
|---|---|---|
| Registration infrastructure | Registering DOIs and metadata (Crossref), exposing records for harvesting (OAI-PMH) | No — open to any publisher who joins and pays |
| Open aggregation | Open scholarly databases that harvest broadly (OpenAlex, Google Scholar) | Largely no — inclusion is near-automatic for well-formed metadata |
| Curated indexing | Databases that evaluate a journal before accepting it (PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, DOAJ) | Yes — an application is assessed and can be refused |
Only the third type carries a quality signal, because only the third type involves somebody else deciding you are good enough. The first two are plumbing. A publisher that lists Crossref and Google Scholar under a heading like "Indexed In" is technically saying something true and practically saying something misleading.
Where our content genuinely reaches
Crossref — yes, as a member
We are a Crossref member and register a DOI for every published article, along with its metadata. This is what makes an article permanently citable and resolvable. It is infrastructure, not endorsement: Crossref membership is available to any publisher that joins and pays its fees, and it says nothing about editorial quality. It does mean your article has a persistent identifier that will keep resolving if our URLs change.
OAI-PMH — yes
Article metadata is exposed through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the standard mechanism that lets aggregators, repositories and discovery services collect records automatically.
JATS XML — yes
Content is produced in JATS, the standard XML format for scholarly articles. This matters because it is the format downstream services expect. A journal publishing only PDFs is much harder for any index to ingest — and increasingly, harder for machines to read at all.
OpenAlex — yes
OpenAlex is an open catalogue of scholarly works that harvests broadly from Crossref and other sources. Our records appear there. Inclusion is essentially automatic for anyone registering good Crossref metadata, so again: reach, not endorsement.
ORCID — yes, as integration
We collect and register author ORCID iDs so published work connects to the correct researcher record. This is an author-identity service, not an index of journals. It appears in our footer because it describes something we do, not somewhere we are listed.
Google Scholar — yes, in the ordinary sense
Our articles are discoverable in Google Scholar. Every open-access publisher with well-formed metadata can say this, which is exactly why it should not be presented as an achievement.
Creative Commons licensing — yes
Articles are published open access under CC-BY. Not an index at all, but it belongs in an honest picture of what happens to your work: anyone may reuse it with attribution.
Where we are not
This is the part most publishers leave out.
| Index | Status | What inclusion would require |
|---|---|---|
| PubMed / PubMed Central | Not indexed | Per-journal application to the US National Library of Medicine, assessed on scientific and editorial quality and technical compliance |
| Scopus | Not indexed | Evaluation by Elsevier's independent Content Selection and Advisory Board |
| Web of Science | Not indexed | Clarivate editorial selection; also the prerequisite for any Journal Impact Factor |
| DOAJ | Not yet listed | Application against DOAJ's criteria covering licensing, peer review transparency, fee disclosure and editorial standards |
| Journal Impact Factor | Not held, and none displayed | Web of Science coverage first; see our separate article on why we display no Impact Factor |
We would like to be in several of these. Saying so is not the same as being in them, and the gap between those two statements is where a great deal of damage gets done to authors who chose a journal on the strength of a badge.
How to verify any indexing claim in five minutes
The rule is simple: check at the index, never at the journal. A logo on a journal website is a picture. The index's own database is the fact.
- PubMed / MEDLINE — search the journal title in the NLM Catalog. If there is no catalogue record, it is not indexed, and a PubMed logo on that journal is false.
- Scopus — check Elsevier's publicly downloadable Scopus source list.
- Web of Science — search Clarivate's Master Journal List.
- DOAJ — search doaj.org directly. DOAJ listing is free to verify and unambiguous.
- Crossref — look up the DOI prefix or the member record at crossref.org.
- Impact Factor — only exists in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports. No JCR entry, no Impact Factor, regardless of what any website says.
Three claims that should stop you
- An index nobody has heard of. There is a substantial industry of invented "indexes" that will list any journal for a fee. If the service has no editorial process and no recognisable governance, its badge is decorative.
- "Under evaluation" or "applied for indexing" shown as a logo. Applying is not being accepted. Displaying the logo of a database that has not accepted you is misleading regardless of intent.
- An Impact Factor on a journal not in Web of Science. Structurally impossible. Whatever number is displayed, it did not come from Clarivate.
Why we publish the negative list
Because the alternative is to let an omission do the work of a lie.
A page listing Crossref, OpenAlex, ORCID and Google Scholar under "Indexing" is not false. It is also, without the second half, actively misleading — it invites an author to conclude that a journal has passed evaluations it has never been through. The omission is the deception.
Authors make real decisions on this: where to send a year of work, whether a paper will count towards a degree, whether a thesis committee will accept the venue. If our indexing status is a problem for your purposes, you should be able to discover that in thirty seconds on this page, not after acceptance.
The formal statement lives on our Indexing, Discovery & Archiving page, with related detail in Digital Preservation & Archiving and Open Access & Licensing. If you find anything on our sites that overstates our indexing, tell us and we will correct it.