A Journal that is in the Web of Science (WoS) as social science citation indexd but it is not found on the list of Journal Citation Report (JCR). The website of the Journal shows also that it is SSCI. What is the cause?
There could be two scenarios. First, the journal could be a predatory journal with bogus impact factor and bogus indexed information. Second, the journals may actually be listed in WOS, but has not been assigned any impact factor yet. There are several journals that have not received an impact factor because they may not have been indexed in WOS for long.
To check for the first issue, I suggest you look up the publisher. If the publisher is legitimate like Wiley, Elsevier, Sage, Wolters Kluwer, Taylor and Francis, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT press; then the journal might not have received any JCR report yet. You may also want to check Beall's predatory journal list.
To check for the second scenario, if you have an EndNote account you can login and enter the section named "Manuscript Match". You can choose some of the similar articles published in that journal and develop a title or abstract just to check of if the journal appears as one of the potential match. I hope this might uncover the mystery of this particular journal.
The Journal is not truly indexed in social science citation or it was an omission on the JCR list.
Be aware of predatory journals. They use whatever they can to attract authors and papers.
There could be two scenarios. First, the journal could be a predatory journal with bogus impact factor and bogus indexed information. Second, the journals may actually be listed in WOS, but has not been assigned any impact factor yet. There are several journals that have not received an impact factor because they may not have been indexed in WOS for long.
To check for the first issue, I suggest you look up the publisher. If the publisher is legitimate like Wiley, Elsevier, Sage, Wolters Kluwer, Taylor and Francis, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT press; then the journal might not have received any JCR report yet. You may also want to check Beall's predatory journal list.
To check for the second scenario, if you have an EndNote account you can login and enter the section named "Manuscript Match". You can choose some of the similar articles published in that journal and develop a title or abstract just to check of if the journal appears as one of the potential match. I hope this might uncover the mystery of this particular journal.
Yes, this is possible. In my view, checking the official website of the target journal is not the best way to ascertain the indexing or abstracting status of the target journal in a particular A&I database. As others already mentioned, there could be a plenty of fabricated information on a journal website. In order to avoid this, you can check the status directly from the official website of the needed A&I database. For example, Master list retrieved from Clarivate Analytics can be used to assure whether the target journal is indexed in WoS or not. If it is included under SCIE or SSCI, but still not appeared in the JCR report of the same year, then most probably it should not have an IF value. As Younas mentioned above, it could be a very fresh journal (not at least 3 years old). JCR does not list journal names those who do not have IF values even if they are indexed in WoS.
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