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Indexing

Indexing is essential for journals where one attempts to publish. To be known as an acknowledged
and prestigious source of quality scientific information and to stand out from among many other
publications that are crowding the publishing space, research journals have to be indexed by
one or more leading databases. For journal articles to be impactful, these must be discoverable,
and online discovery rests almost entirely on indexing. Without proper indexing, researchers
will be hard-pressed to find even the best of the scholarly articles available in the field. Journals
included in an index are considered of higher quality than journals that are not. This is because
journals have to go through a vetting process to be included or indexed in reputable bibliographic
databases. Once a journal is indexed by a database, it is immediately available to all users of that
database. Some databases index titles, some index full articles, while some others index only the
abstract and/or references.
It is perhaps important to understand the various requirements of getting a journal indexed. From
general search engines to discipline-specific databases and aggregators, there are numerous indexing
options that journals can be indexed in, all with different benefits. Each index a journal seeks inclusion
in will have its own requirements for entry and likely take time to get set up. It’s important to pick a
few to start with and then follow through with the necessary steps to be added to those indexes before
moving on to new ones. Being included in subscription-free large scholarly search engines, Google
Scholar and Microsoft Academic can be a good starting point.

Starting with general search engines, these indexes will be searching the web for content to index via
computer programs commonly referred to as ‘crawlers’, ‘spiders’, or ‘bots’. One can do a quick check to
make sure the journal websites are showing up in search results by typing ‘site’ followed by the URL
you want to check in the search bar. If the site shows up, it’s being indexed by these databases. Many
indexing requirements will essentially be standard across databases. Some of the most common index
criteria include that all journals should have:

• International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).

• Digital Object Identifiers for all articles (DOIs).
• Editorial Board page with names, titles, and affiliations of the editors.

• Clearly stated time bound peer review policy and publishing schedule.

• Established copyright or IPR policy.

• At least basic article-level metadata to facilitate indexing.

In case the journal does not have all of these, then publishing in such journals is of no use. Journals
can improve their indexing outcomes further by producing articles in full-text computer formats,
including full-text HTML and XML. Articles in these formats are more search-engine friendly than
PDFs because they are machine-readable and can be made mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendliness is now
a leading content ranking factor for many search-engine indexes, including Google. Some indexing
databases such as Pub Med Central actually require full-text XML files for the articles. Even if not
required, putting full-text HTML or XML files into databases is advantageous as it allows for greater
article usage. A common misconception about Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic is that they
index all the content they have access to regardless of the content type or quality. This is not the case.
Both scholarly search engines have certain quality controls in place and take steps to ensure only the
academic websites are indexed.

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