1 · Technical pre-check mandatory
A journal must satisfy all of the following minimums before expert evaluation begins. Failing any item pauses the application; you may fix the issue and notify us within 60 days.
- 1 Valid ISSN — a registered print and/or electronic ISSN, confirmed at the ISSN Portal, matching the journal title.
- 2 Working website — the journal's own site, reachable and served over HTTPS, presenting current and archived issues.
- 3 Publication history — at least two years of regular publication, or at least 10 peer-reviewed research articles published.
- 4 Declared peer-review procedure — publicly described: the model, the steps, and who decides.
- 5 Public ethics policy — a publication-ethics and malpractice statement on the website.
- 6 International-language titles and abstracts — every article carries a title and abstract in English or another international language.
- 7 Named editorial board — editor-in-chief and members listed with institutions, and a reachable editorial contact.
- 8 Full text per article at a permanent URL — each article individually addressable. One PDF containing a whole issue does not satisfy this.
- 9 Transparent charges — any APC or submission fee, including "none", stated openly before submission.
- 10 Identifiable publisher — a legal name and a reachable address for the publishing organization, stated on the site. This gate asks only whether the disclosure exists; how complete it is — registration details, governance — is scored separately under Transparency & Verifiability.
- 11 No fabricated or unverifiable metrics — no invented "impact factors", and no claim of indexing that the index itself does not confirm. We check the claims on your site against the authoritative source lists.
- 12 Registered representative and evaluator access — an account held by an authorized representative, and full access to the content for the evaluators.
Publication volume is deliberately not a gate. A journal publishing few articles a year is not excluded here; output is scored inside the CiteLink Value instead, so that a young or small journal is judged on how it publishes rather than on how much.
2 · The CiteLink Value (CLV)
The CLV is a 0–100 composite over five criterion groups, designed so that every point is verifiable from journal-level evidence — no article database or citation counts are required, which keeps the score fair for young and regional journals.
3 · The five criterion groups
4 · Quartiles C1–C4
Quartiles are not derived from the CLV, and the two are deliberately kept apart. Within each research subfield, a journal is ranked by its share of articles among the world's top-10% most cited — computed fractionally and normalized by field, year and document type, from open citation data. C1 is the top band, C4 the bottom. Ties are promoted to the better band, so the four bands do not hold exactly a quarter each.
A journal holds an independent quartile in every subfield it publishes enough in — there is no single global rank. Quartiles come from a versioned citation snapshot, not from the annual CLV round, and they are published today for journals that have never applied. See rankings for the current edition.
5 · Re-evaluation & delisting
Annual re-evaluation
Each indexed journal is re-scored yearly against current evidence. Improved practice raises the CLV; lapses lower it.
Watch status
A journal missing scheduled issues, or subject to a credible ethics complaint, is placed under observation (flagged on its profile) and given 6 months to remediate.
Delisting
Unresolved failures — or any confirmed integrity breach — lead to removal. Delisted journals keep an archived profile marked “no longer indexed”, and may reapply after 12 months.
6 · Appeals
Applicants may appeal a rejection or a score within 30 days via the Publisher Panel. Appeals are to be reviewed by an evaluator not involved in the original assessment, with the outcome and reasoning communicated in writing. Target resolution time is four weeks. No journal has been evaluated yet, so no appeal has been heard — and the advisory board that will oversee this process is not yet convened (see About). Every applicant — accepted or not — receives the full evaluation report with group-level scores and improvement recommendations, free of charge.