Journals & Ranking

An academic journal or research journal is a periodical publication in which research articles relating to a particular academic discipline is published, according to Wikipedia. Currently, there are more than 25,000 peer-reviewed journals that are indexed in citation index databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These indexes are ranked on the basis of various metrics such as CiteScore, H-index, etc. The metrics are calculated from yearly citation data of the journal. A lot of efforts are given to make a metric that reflects the journal's quality.

Journal Ranking Dataset

This is a comprehensive dataset on the academic journals coving their metadata information as well as citation, metrics, and ranking information. Detailed data on their subject area is also given in this dataset. The dataset is collected from the following indexing databases: - Scimago Journal Ranking - Scopus - Web of Science Master Journal List

The data is collected by scraping and then it was cleaned, details of which can be found in HERE.

Key Features

• Rank: Overall rank of journal (derived from sorted SJR index).
• Title: Name or title of journal.
• OA: Open Access or not.
• Country: Country of origin.
• SJR-index: A citation index calculated by Scimago.
• CiteScore: A citation index calculated by Scopus.
• H-index: Hirsh index, the largest number h such that at least h articles in that journal were cited at least h times each.
• Best Quartile: Top Q-index or quartile a journal has in any subject area.
• Best Categories: Subject areas with top quartile.
• Best Subject Area: Highest ranking subject area.
• Best Subject Rank: Rank of the highest ranking subject area.
• Total Docs.: Total number of documents of the journal.
• Total Docs. 3y: Total number of documents in the past 3 years.
• Total Refs.: Total number of references of the journal.
• Total Cites 3y: Total number of citations in the past 3 years.
• Citable Docs. 3y: Total number of citable documents in the past 3 years.
• Cites/Doc. 2y: Total number of citations divided by the total number of documents in the past 2 years.
• Refs./Doc.: Total number of references divided by the total number of documents.
• Publisher: Name of the publisher company of the journal.
• Core Collection: Web of Science core collection name.
• Coverage: Starting year of coverage.
• Active: Active or inactive.
• In-Press: Articles in press or not.
• ISO Language Code: Three-letter ISO 639 code for language.
• ASJC Codes: All Science Journal Classification codes for the journal.

Rest of the features provide further details on the journal's subject area or category: - Life Sciences: Top level subject area. - Social Sciences: Top level subject area. - Physical Sciences: Top level subject area. - Health Sciences: Top level subject area. - 1000 General: ASJC main category. - 1100 Agricultural and Biological Sciences: ASJC main category. - 1200 Arts and Humanities: ASJC main category. - 1300 Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology: ASJC main category. - 1400 Business, Management and Accounting: ASJC main category. - 1500 Chemical Engineering: ASJC main category. - 1600 Chemistry: ASJC main category. - 1700 Computer Science: ASJC main category. - 1800 Decision Sciences: ASJC main category. - 1900 Earth and Planetary Sciences: ASJC main category. - 2000 Economics, Econometrics and Finance: ASJC main category. - 2100 Energy: ASJC main category. - 2200 Engineering: ASJC main category. - 2300 Environmental Science: ASJC main category. - 2400 Immunology and Microbiology: ASJC main category. - 2500 Materials Science: ASJC main category. - 2600 Mathematics: ASJC main category. - 2700 Medicine: ASJC main category. - 2800 Neuroscience: ASJC main category. - 2900 Nursing: ASJC main category. - 3000 Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics: ASJC main category. - 3100 Physics and Astronomy: ASJC main category. - 3200 Psychology: ASJC main category. - 3300 Social Sciences: ASJC main category. - 3400 Veterinary: ASJC main category. - 3500 Dentistry: ASJC main category. - 3600 Health Professions: ASJC main category.

Introduction: These datasets contain information about journals in the eight regions of the world based on United Nations SDG classification (Central& Southern Asia, Europe, Eastern &South Eastern Asia, Latin America, North Africa& Western Asia, Oceania, North America and Sub-Saharan Africa) that are indexed in Web of Science/Scopus and are available in Ulrich periodical directory. The datasets were created by matching Ulrich journal information with journal information from Web of Science and Scopus.

Data Creation: A single Web of Science master journal list was created for SSCI, SCI, AHCI and ESCI by combining and removing duplicate records from their lists; the Web of Science master journal contained 21,908 unique journals. Only active scholarly journals from Scopus were included in this study; i.e. duplicates, all inactive sources, trade journals, book series, monographs and conference proceedings were removed. 26,029 active journals of the 43,013 sources in Scopus were included. Journal lists from 239 countries were collected from Ulrich comprehensive periodical directory and analyzed by region. After removal of duplicates, this generated a database of 83,429 unique active academic journals. To compile regional and global datasets, duplicate journals in the regional and global levels, respectively, were removed. The master journal lists created from Web of Science, Scopus and Ulrich were transferred to an SQL database for querying. Journal matching was carried out in two steps. Firstly, the ISSN numbers of journals in Web of Science and Scopus were used to match journal records to Ulrich. In the second step, the remaining journals were then matched using their titles, and these matches were manually verified to reduce the chances of false positives. Using these two steps, we were able to match 20,255 (92.46%) of the journals in Web of Science, and 23,349 (89.70%) of the academic journals from Scopus, with Ulrichsweb journal list.

Version: 5

Authors: Carlota Balsa-Sánchez, Vanesa Loureiro

Date of data collection: 2023/09/05

General description: The publication of datasets according to the FAIR principles, could be reached publishing a data paper (or software paper) in data journals or in academic standard journals. The excel and CSV file contains a list of academic journals that publish data papers and software papers. File list:

• data_articles_journal_list_v5.xlsx: full list of 140 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published
• data_articles_journal_list_v5.csv: full list of 140 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published

Relationship between files: both files have the same information. Two different formats are offered to improve reuse

Type of version of the dataset: final processed version

Versions of the files: 5th version - Information updated: number of journals, URL, document types associated to a specific journal.

Version: 4

Authors: Carlota Balsa-Sánchez, Vanesa Loureiro

Date of data collection: 2022/12/15

General description: The publication of datasets according to the FAIR principles, could be reached publishing a data paper (or software paper) in data journals or in academic standard journals. The excel and CSV file contains a list of academic journals that publish data papers and software papers. File list:

• data_articles_journal_list_v4.xlsx: full list of 140 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published
• data_articles_journal_list_v4.csv: full list of 140 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published

Relationship between files: both files have the same information. Two different formats are offered to improve reuse

Type of version of the dataset: final processed version

Versions of the files: 4th version - Information updated: number of journals, URL, document types associated to a specific journal, publishers normalization and simplification of document types - Information added : listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), indexed in Web of Science (WOS) and quartile in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and/or Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR), Scopus and Web of Science (WOS), Journal Master List.

Version: 3

Authors: Carlota Balsa-Sánchez, Vanesa Loureiro

Date of data collection: 2022/10/28

General description: The publication of datasets according to the FAIR principles, could be reached publishing a data paper (or software paper) in data journals or in academic standard journals. The excel and CSV file contains a list of academic journals that publish data papers and software papers. File list:

• data_articles_journal_list_v3.xlsx: full list of 124 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published
• data_articles_journal_list_3.csv: full list of 124 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published

Relationship between files: both files have the same information. Two different formats are offered to improve reuse

Type of version of the dataset: final processed version

Versions of the files: 3rd version - Information updated: number of journals, URL, document types associated to a specific journal, publishers normalization and simplification of document types - Information added : listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), indexed in Web of Science (WOS) and quartile in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and/or Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR).

Erratum - Data articles in journals Version 3:

Botanical Studies -- ISSN 1999-3110 -- JCR (JIF) Q2 Data -- ISSN 2306-5729 -- JCR (JIF) n/a Data in Brief -- ISSN 2352-3409 -- JCR (JIF) n/a

Version: 2

Author: Francisco Rubio, Universitat Politècnia de València.

Date of data collection: 2020/06/23

General description: The publication of datasets according to the FAIR principles, could be reached publishing a data paper (or software paper) in data journals or in academic standard journals. The excel and CSV file contains a list of academic journals that publish data papers and software papers. File list:

• data_articles_journal_list_v2.xlsx: full list of 56 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published
• data_articles_journal_list_v2.csv: full list of 56 academic journals in which data papers or/and software papers could be published

Relationship between files: both files have the same information. Two different formats are offered to improve reuse

Type of version of the dataset: final processed version

Versions of the files: 2nd version - Information updated: number of journals, URL, document types associated to a specific journal, publishers normalization and simplification of document types - Information added : listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), indexed in Web of Science (WOS) and quartile in Scimago Journal and Country Rank (SJR)

Total size: 32 KB

Version 1: Description

This dataset contains a list of journals that publish data articles, code, software articles and database articles.

The search strategy in DOAJ and Ulrichsweb was the search for the word data in the title of the journals. Acknowledgements: Xaquín Lores Torres for his invaluable help in preparing this dataset.

Journal lists of all the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries were retrieved manually from Ulrich periodical database using the "country of publication" field in the advanced search interface. Delimiters were used to limit the retrieved results to periodicals in the journal categories and with active status. Ulrich's database usually multiple records for the different formats (eg. online and print), or languages in which a single journal is published. Duplicates were removed from the retrieved results.

Master journal lists for Web of Science indexes comprising of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index ESCI. Master journal lists for Scopus, EMBASE and MEDLINE databases were downloaded from their respective publishers' websites. Master journal lists for AJOL was not available on the publishers' website. Therefore, the master journal list from AJOL was created manually by extracting journal information from the publishers' websites. Only active journals were included in the study, where active journals were defined as journals that have published at least an issue in 2021 or 2020. The master journal list for AIM was not available as well. The whole database comprising of 18,949 articles were downloaded with the source (journal names). Journals were sorted to identify unique journal names, where only 15,279 articles had identifiable journal names. Five hundred twenty-four unique journals were identified, with only 74 active journals. Journals that were not indexed in the AIM database in 2020 or 2021 were deemed inactive and were not included in the study. This study was not considered for ethics review because data used was collected from publicly available records.

Data enclosed in a single zipped folder:

A) DASH-V2 : Data files for final published analysis (J. Informetrics, 2019)

File A1: PubData_DOI_141986_Nc_0_2019.dta

File A2: PubData_DOI_141986_Nc_0_2019_DOFILE

B) DASH-V1 : Data files for preprint version (https://ssrn.com/abstract=2901272)

File B1: PubData_Obs_102741_Nc_10_No2015_CitationsAnalysis.dta

File B2: PubData_Obs_128734_Nc_10_AcceptanceTimeAnalysis.dta

File B3: STATA13_DOFILE

C) Data description common to all .dta files, which contain parsed and merged PLOS ONE and Web of Science metadata:

File A3: UC-DASH_DataDescription_Petersen_V2.pdf

File B4: UC-DASH_DataDescription_Petersen_V1.pdf

Research data to accommodate the article "Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape" (https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006221125208)

Identifying the sample of overlay journals was an explorative process (occurring during April 2021 to February 2022). The sample of investigated overlay journals were identified by using the websites of Episciences.org (2021), Scholastica (2021), Free Journal Network (2021), Open Journals (2021), PubPub (2022), and Wikipedia (2021). In total, this study identified 34 overlay journals. Please see the paper for more details about the excluded journal types.

The journal ISSN numbers, manuscript source repositories, first overlay volumes, article volumes, publication languages, peer-review type, licence for published articles, author costs, publisher types, submission policy, and preprint availability policy were observed by inspecting journal editorial policies and submission guidelines found from journal websites. The overlay journals’ ISSN numbers were identified by examining journal websites and cross-checking this information with the Ulrich’s periodicals database (Ulrichsweb, 2021). Journals that published review reports, either with reviewers’ names or anonymously, were classified as operating with open peer-review. Publisher types defined by Laakso and Björk (2013) were used to categorise the findings concerning the publishers. If the journal website did not include publisher information, the editorial board was interpreted to publish the journal.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) field of science classification was used to categorise the journals into different domains of science. The journals’ primary OECD field of sciences were defined by the authors through examining the journal websites.

Whether the journals were indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, or Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core collection’s journal master list was examined by searching the services with journal ISSN numbers and journal titles.

The identified overlay journals were examined from the viewpoint of both qualitative and quantitative journal metrics. The qualitative metrics comprised the Nordic expert panel rankings of scientific journals, namely the Finnish Publication Forum, the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. Searches were conducted from the web portals of the above services with both ISSN numbers and journal titles. Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports database was searched with the use of both ISSN numbers and journal titles to identify whether the journals had a Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), Two-Year Impact Factor (IF) and an Impact Factor ranking (IF rank). The examined Journal Impact Factors and Impact Factor rankings were for the year 2020 (as released in 2021).