Research Guides: Journal Quality Evaluation: Journal Quality

Resources for Evaluating Journal Quality

Cabells Journalytics This link opens in a new window
Contact information for journals in many disciplines. Cabell's has a "whitelist" of journals and a "blacklist," which is intended to identify low quality journals, taking over some of the functions of Jeffrey Beall's List.
Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
Use this tool to compare journals in the sciences and the social sciences. It includes "impact factor" scores that measure the influence of each journal on its field of study.
Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Detailed information about journals, magazines, and newspapers. Tells whether a journal is peer-reviewed and indexed in databases.

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
The most important publicly available "whitelist," DOAJ is "a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals."
Google Scholar Metrics
This resource uses Google Scholar data from 2007 on to show how much journals have been cited.
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
Membership in this association indicates a commitment to abiding by certain standards and a code of conduct.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank
This tool shows how much journals have been cited, using the Scopus database data from 1996 on.
Beall's List of Predatory Journals and Publishers
Librarian Jeffrey Beall originally developed this list, but had to take it down. This is an archived copy.

thinkchecksubmit
A product of a campaign by scholarly organizations, this site includes a checklist to evaluate journals.
Assessing Journal Quality
This much more in-depth guide by Boston College provides longer explanations and more evaluation tools.
Choosing a Journal for Publication of an Article
This guide by a science librarian at Yale takes a different slant on the issue, and talks about how you decide where you DO want to publish.
Scholarly and Peer Reviewed Journals
UHD Library explains the basics about scholarly/peer-reviewed journals.