I am wondering how can we rank the relevance of indexing databases (services) of academic journals. In particular I would like to see the top 5 to 10 scientific databases based on journal's importance. For example, the first place would be journals indexed in Current Contents. What database would be on the second place? On the 10th place? I am aware that a particular journal can be indexed in many databases. But are there any objective criteria that can help in answering this question?
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.
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