About CiteLink
A transparent, criteria-based indexing service built to make trustworthy journals visible — wherever they are published.
Indexing without the black box
Scholarly indexing decides which journals researchers find, which titles libraries recommend, and — in many countries — which publications count toward academic careers. Yet the decision of who gets indexed has too often been opaque: unpublished criteria, unexplained rejections, and coverage that skews toward large, English-language publishers with substantial budgets.
CiteLink was founded to do this differently. Every journal we list is evaluated against the same published criteria, and every accepted title receives a public CiteLink Value (CLV) score with its full five-group breakdown. A university press in İzmir, a society journal in Nairobi and a commercial publisher in Amsterdam are measured with exactly the same yardstick.
We believe visibility should follow quality — not region, language or budget. That is why applying to CiteLink is free of charge, why our evaluation reports are shared with every applicant regardless of outcome, and why our journal metadata is open to anyone — today through our statistics and article search, and through REST API and OAI-PMH endpoints once they are built.
What makes CiteLink different
We studied the strengths and blind spots of the world's indexing services — and built the index we wished existed.
Transparent CLV scoring
Every journal's 0–100 CiteLink Value is published together with its full breakdown across five audited criterion groups — editorial standards and ethics, publication stability, digitalization and technical infrastructure, internationalization, and transparency. No secret formulas.
No article-database gatekeeping
We index at the journal level first. Titles are not excluded because their articles are missing from a proprietary citation database — quality is judged on editorial practice, not on legacy coverage.
Open data by default
All journal-level metadata — scores, policies, identifiers — will be freely harvestable via the planned REST API and OAI-PMH. Libraries, aggregators and repositories can reuse it without licensing fees.
Ethics-first monitoring
COPE-aligned ethics checks are scored inside group A, not an afterthought. Evaluated journals are to be re-assessed annually, and titles that fall below standards are flagged, reviewed and — where necessary — delisted. This said “indexed journals” until 29 Sep 2026. Coverage and evaluation became two different things on this site that day, and one word could no longer stand for both.
Free & fast
Journals never pay CiteLink — not to apply, not to be evaluated, not to stay listed, and not to display the seal. There is no expedited route at any price. The technical pre-check completes within 10 business days and full evaluation within three months — with a detailed report delivered either way.
Genuinely global scope
Journals publishing in any language are welcome, provided abstracts and metadata meet interoperability standards. Regional and non-English scholarship deserves discovery infrastructure, too.
Our evaluation principles
Six commitments govern every decision we make. They are binding on our editorial office and on every member of our expert reviewer pool.
- ✓ Same criteria for everyone. Every journal — regardless of publisher size, country or business model — is scored against the identical published rubric.
- ✓ Evidence over reputation. Scores rest on verifiable evidence: live policies, named boards, registered DOIs, archiving arrangements — never on prestige or personal networks.
- ✓ Every applicant gets a report. Rejected journals receive the same detailed evaluation report as accepted ones, including concrete steps toward a successful reapplication.
- ✓ Annual re-evaluation. Indexing is not a lifetime seal. Each title's CLV is recalculated every year, and continuous monitoring can trigger an off-cycle review.
- ✓ Conflicts of interest disclosed and managed. Evaluators never review journals from institutions or publishers they are affiliated with, and all recusals are logged.
- ✓ Appeals heard by fresh eyes. Any decision will be appealable once per cycle, handled by an evaluator uninvolved in the original assessment, within 30 days of the decision. No decision has been issued yet.
The organization behind the index
CiteLink is operated from İstanbul, Türkiye, by Zeus Publishing — a small operation rather than a staffed institution. This said İzmir until 30 Aug 2026, eight days after the owner confirmed the published İzmir address was wrong and contact.html was corrected to İstanbul (commit 793f869). It survived because the sentence was edited earlier the same day for a different defect and the city was carried across unread. Until 30 Aug 2026 this sentence described “a dedicated editorial office of information specialists, metadata engineers and research-integrity officers”. It stood one sentence above a paragraph corrected in August for describing the advisory board in the present tense, and it was the same defect: a reader deciding whether to trust a score needs to know who is behind it, and inflating that is the least defensible thing an index can do. Evaluation decisions are to be guided by an international advisory board of academic librarians, journal editors and scholarly-communication researchers, whose remit will be to review the criteria annually, audit a random sample of evaluation reports each quarter, and rule on appeals and delisting cases. No publisher and no commercial sponsor will hold a seat on it or any role in individual indexing decisions.
This board does not exist yet. It is a Phase 1 item on the development plan, and no journal has been evaluated, so there are no reports to sample and no appeals to hear. An earlier version of this paragraph described the board in the present tense and said it spanned fourteen countries. That was not true, and it was the only governance statement on the site — the reason an editor would trust a score from an issuer they have not heard of. The roster will be published here when the board is convened.
Ownership and conflict of interest
CiteLink is operated by Zeus Publishing, which publishes three journals of its own: International Dental Research, Journal of Medical and Dental Investigations and Health Science Monitor. On 29 September 2026 the operator selected those same three as the first journals CiteLink indexes, and they may display an “Indexed in CiteLink” seal. They are currently the entire indexed set.
That is the most adverse sentence on this site and it is stated in full rather than softened. An index whose entire coverage is its own publisher's titles has a conflict that disclosure does not remove — disclosure only makes it visible and checkable. Until the indexed set contains journals Zeus Publishing does not publish, a reader should read the seal as a statement of coverage by a related party and weigh it accordingly. The selection, its date, the three records and the fact that no coverage criterion has been published yet are all in indexed-journals.json, so the claim can be audited instead of taken on trust.
Indexed is not evaluated, and the difference is the point.
Indexed means CiteLink covers the journal. It does not mean the journal passed the
published criteria: the CiteLink Value programme has not opened, there are no
evaluators and no advisory board, and journals.clv is NULL on all 63,664 records — these three
included. No journal has been evaluated yet, and when the programme opens these three go through it like
anyone else, with the result published like anyone else's. The catalogue is a
third thing again: 63,664 records folded from open citation data, describing every journal OpenAlex
holds, with no selection at all.
Until 29 Sep 2026 this section said the three were “in the catalogue on exactly the same footing as every other title” and that the operator's titles were kept “out of anything that looks like a recommendation”. Both were true when written and neither survived the selection above: a seal is a recommendation, and three titles now carry one that the other 63,661 do not. The sentences are recorded here rather than deleted, because what a page used to promise is part of what a reader is owed.
Where we started, where we're going
2025 — Concept
The CiteLink evaluation framework is drafted, publicly consulted on, and refined into the CiteLink Value model, later bound to the five-group A–E rubric. The criteria are frozen for the first evaluation cycle. Convening the advisory board is a Phase 1 item and has not happened.
Criteria v1.0 published openly2026 — Platform launch
The public platform goes live with the Journal Master List, publisher profiles, subject rankings and embeddable badges. The catalogue describes 62,643 journals from open citation data; the indexed set is a separate, deliberate selection and currently holds 3, all of them the operator's own (see Ownership below). The evaluation programme opens separately again, and no journal has been evaluated yet. A machine-readable API is on the roadmap, not live.
You are here2027 — Roadmap: article discovery & citation graph
CiteLink already reaches beneath the journal level: 101.7 million articles are searchable today, and 98.2 million of them (96.5%) carry a field-normalized citation impact. The other 3,525,429 are searchable without a score, almost all of them older than the 1950 floor the normalisation baseline starts at. This said “each carrying” until 3 September 2026. Refreshed 19 September 2026, when the article layer grew from 7.2 million to 104.7 million as the site moved to its own server, and refreshed again on 27 September 2026, when the 23 September OpenAlex release replaced the June one and the layer shrank to 101.7 million — 2,926,708 fewer than the week before. That second refresh also broke the explanation this note used to give. It said the newest article still lacking a score was dated 1949, so the floor accounted for the whole gap; measured 28 September 2026, 56 papers published in 1950 or later carry no score and the newest of them is dated 1966. The floor accounts for all but those 56, and why they fall outside it has not been established. What remains on the roadmap is widening that to the full corpus.
In development — journal-level metadata remains the coreThink your journal belongs here?
Applications are free, the criteria are public, and every applicant receives a detailed evaluation report — accepted or not.