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Legal Scholarship Publishing Guide: Journal Index Strategy

Journal indexing strategy

Journal Indexing Strategy

To get your journal indexed it’s important to have a strategy to help give success in your indexing goals. Below is a suggested strategy that you should adapt based on your journals’ goals.

This strategy is based on Scholastica’s Guide to academic journal indexing.

  1. Find out where your journal is indexed using Ulrichweb
  2. Develop your discoverability and scholarly impact goals: are you aiming to increase readership in your legal scholarship? Or are you interested in broadening a global audience and making content as accessible as possible?
  3. Narrow down the indexes you want your journal to be in. Subjects in multidisciplinary indexes for law are often found under social science, so you may want to look for indexes that contain a large social science collections.
    • Consider the level of article discovery benefits different indexes will offer. Is it accessible or is the index available by a paid subscription only? Additionally some indexes only provide citation and abstracts, while other will include a full-text of the article.
  4. After deciding which indexes to be included in, find out the minimum requirements and any application deadlines.
    • Learn about the key journal indexing criteria. For example, Scopus requires a journal to have published for 2+ years to be considered for inclusion. A technical criteria for many indexes is having an online ISSN (International Standard Serial Number).
  5. Applying the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing is not a requirement by all indexes, but adhering to the highest technical standards is critical to maximizing their discovery benefits
  6. Meet technical criteria for content ingestion by the index. This includes having proper HTML meta-tags and rich metadata in a format that is machine readable and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The Law Library helps facilitate this requirement through the Digital Commons publishing platforms.
  7. Review the application form for the index and identify what areas your are missing.
  8. Review the Osgoode Digital Common's recommended journal policies statement your journal website should display and follow
  9. Contact the Digital Scholarship Librarian to go over your strategy and questions.

If you are looking to broaden the visibility of your journal then it is important to be indexed in academic indexes outside of legal indexes, so work can be accessible to other researchers. Although it is ideal to be included in as many indexes as possible, journals should be strategic in their efforts and try to be indexed in databases that can offer the most exposure with a less strict application process. After acceptance, this will increase visibility and provide a more positive evaluation of your journal when applying to stricter indexes that look at citation metrics.