Dear Haris,

It is not clear what 'Journal's Importance' means because it looks totally subjective as something that you need to rank objectively. If you mean what databases are important for the journals to be indexed in, then I woul say the databases are well-known and highly-used by the users community. For example if it is an English medical journal, I would say being indexed in MEDLINE oe PubMed Central would be enough but other databases are added value.

There is no ceratain objective criteria for ranking the databases in this way and if there is any rankind, it could be based on a certain aspect not in general.

For example

• You might be able to rank the databases based on users' satisfaction in a certain community of users
• You could rand them based on their topic coverage
• You could rank them based on their size
• You could rank them based on the sensistivity/specificity of search results
• You could be able to rank them based on a certain definitions of 'Relevance': It depends on what type of 'Relevance' you consider for your rank. If you look at works published by Tefko Saracevic you may get some ideas.
• etc.

I would say, each database is different from the other databases in terms of their purpose, coverage, etc and I'm not sure if ranking them in general is a good idea.

Well  actually I asked this question in relation to the ratings of a researcher. For example, when competing for a tenure at some University you are competing with your collegues for the position.  It is supposed that can value someone's scientific contibution through the published work.

Ok, and now the (hypothetical) situation is this (all other things being equal): I have 3 CC articles, 3 SCImagoarticles and 3 Medline/Psychinfo articles. My competing collegue has 10 Index Copernicus/Google Scholar articles. And he/she gets the tenure because of more published articles. Fair? That is one of the reasons why I think there should be some universal rating of the databases.

There is no categorized ranking. the two major indexing databases are Scopus and Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters mentions the impacts factor of journals whereas scopus classifies journals as Qi-Q4 category based on SJR and cites per doc analysis. Finally, Google scholar is a new indexing databases which picks up authors work as available on the internet. Most universities for promotions, award of PhD  wants research publication indexed in either Scopus or Thomson Reuters

Indeed this is a valuable question. I will answer it for sure by writing a detail article on this topic. Currently, I authored and article titled "Not-for-Profit Top 10 Academic Journal Quality/Ranking Lists". You can find it here: http://scholarsindex.com/articles/not-for-profit-top-10-academic-journal-qualityranking-lists

It is common among academic professionals to check listing/ranking of academic journals in recognized journal ranking/quality lists before submitting their articles to an academic journal. Professional research evaluation committees also frequently use such quality journal lists. Although, many scholars consider indexing/abstracting databases like SSCI, SCI, Scopus, Inspec, MEDLINE etc. but this article will focus on the academic journal quality/ranking lists developed by various countries/institutions. I will only provide journal quality lists/rankings developed by not-for-profit organizations because products developed by for-profit companies always reflect some degree of bias. Therefore, I will exclude the lists/rankings like Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics Journal Ranking, Cabell’s Journals list, SCImago journal ranking (although it is free but is based on for-profit database Scopus) etc.

There are various academic journal ranking lists available in the market. For instance, Google Scholar provides a free list of 100 top multidisciplinary publications. This list is based on h5-index. Publications having higher h5-index are ranked higher. This list may be useful for scholars but has a very limited scope because it is not possible for every research scholar to publish in these top 100 publications. Secondly, this list excludes (or journals in these areas may not have reached to the desired h5-index value) many science and art areas for example, fine arts, music, astronomy, business, management etc. Similarly, Financial Times also calculates academic journal rankings and provides top 50 academic journal list for free. Again, the scope of this list is very limited because it only provides 50 journals in the areas of management and business. Hence, FT journal list is not very useful for scholars as a whole just like Google Scholar’s top publication list. The French Foundation for Management Education (FNEGE), University of Sydney Business School, and Australian Research Council (ARC) Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) also maintain their journal quality lists. In addition, AERES, CNRS, and Qualis journal quality/ranking lists are also used in France, and Brazil. However, these lists are not able to gain international popularity.

Have been asking this question literally every day. In the indexing game. Scopus and Web of science are the frontrunners. I think they need to establish clear cut criteria's for it, or maybe there is a criteria we are yet to know about