Journal quality: is the publication indexed by pertinent databases? / Zuraira Libasin

Last Thursday (22 September 2022), I attended a webinar conducted by PTAR. It is a collaboration with Elsevier. The webinar's title is "How To Choose The Best Journals To Publish Your Manuscripts In". The invited speaker is Mr. Nicholas Pak, Senior Customer Consultant, Elsevier, from Singapore. In this article, I would like to share one of the subtopics from the webinar. It is about the journal's quality. Is the publication indexed by pertinent databases? What should we, as the author, have to do? Firstly, look for the journal in a database of scientific articles with a stringent selection process, like Scopus or Web of Science (WOS). Don't just take the journal's word for it that it's included in bibliographic databases. Predatory publications may publish exaggerated findings. Additionally, the speaker urged audience members to ensure the journal is included in a peer-reviewed publication database. For example, all journals listed in Scopus are reviewed by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), comprising subject experts from around the world. For inclusion in Scopus, journals must have peer review, English abstracts, regular publication (i.e., an ISSN), roman script references and a publishing ethics statement. They are then assessed against 14 quantitative and qualitative selection criteria that examine journal policy, content quality, journal standing, regularity and online availability. There could be a lag time before the journal is indexed in databases if it is a new journal. What is a predatory journal? Predatory journals exploit authors by charging them to publish without peer review or offering editing services, as stated by MD Anderson researcher Laurissa Gann (2021). Predatory publishers typically promise a fast turnaround on publishing work despite not adhering to the appropriate academic criteria for publishing. On the other hand, quality academic publications take more time because each article must go through a thorough peer review and copyediting procedure before being published.