For Publishers — Services & Widgets
Indexing is only the beginning. CiteLink gives your journals visibility, verifiable quality signals and free machine-readable distribution.
CiteLink is built for the people who actually run journals: managing editors, editorial offices and publishing houses. Every service on this page is included with indexing — there is no premium tier, no paid fast-track and no fee to apply. Whether you publish one diamond-OA title from a university department or a portfolio of forty journals, the same tools, the same criteria and the same published methodology apply. Below you will find what indexed journals receive, how the badges and widgets work, and how libraries and aggregators can harvest your metadata through our open interfaces.
Why index your journal in CiteLink
Six concrete outcomes of a successful application — and one guarantee that applies even if your journal is not accepted.
Visibility where it matters
Your journal gets a permanent, linkable profile in the Journal Master List — searchable by title, ISSN, subject, country, access model and APC, with its metrics, quartile and the evidence behind them on one page.
Where this stands today. A profile becomes indexable once its record has loaded; a page that fails to load, or the bare template with no ?id=, stays out of the index deliberately. That works for search engines which run JavaScript, and it is the honest limit of a site with no server rendering — a crawler that does not run JavaScript will not index the profile. A profile that loads now also carries a schema.org Periodical block in its page source — title, ISSNs, the OpenAlex identifier, the publisher where one is recorded, and the first publication year. It carries no score, no quartile and no rating, because no journal has been evaluated. Machine harvesting in the bulk sense is planned over OAI-PMH and a REST API, as Free metadata below says. Neither exists yet: per-page markup a crawler reads while rendering the page is not a feed you can pull your whole catalogue from, and nothing is being harvested in bulk today.
A transparent CLV report — even if rejected
Every evaluated journal receives the full dimension-by-dimension score sheet with evaluator comments. Journals that fall short learn exactly why, and may reapply after addressing the findings. Nothing is a black box.
Badges & certificate
Accepted journals may embed the “Indexed in CiteLink” badge and the live CLV widget on their website, and receive an annual PDF indexing certificate carrying a unique number — a quality signal authors can check. The public verification URL that would let them check it without writing to us is planned, not built.
Rankings & statistics
Indexed titles are automatically included in the annual subject rankings with C1–C4 quartiles — which come from open citation data, not from the CLV — and in the platform-wide statistics — by field, country, license and open-access model.
Metadata distribution
Journal-level metadata will be exposed free of charge through the planned REST API and OAI-PMH endpoint, so union catalogues, repositories and research-information systems can ingest your titles without any per-record agreements.
Alerts bring you followers
Readers can save journals and organizations to a personal library in their own browser. Notifications are not built: we send no e-mail of any kind yet, so nobody is alerted when a journal is indexed or a CLV changes. Planned, and worth naming as absent because this box promised the alerts as a benefit until 30 Aug 2026.
Badges & widgets
Embeddable, always up to date, and verifiable with one click. Available to all currently indexed journals at no charge.
Badge examples
Three variants will be generated for every indexed journal. The badge is a self-contained inline SVG that you paste into your page: it loads nothing from us, so it cannot break when this site moves, and for the same reason it does not update itself — a badge carrying a score has to be re-copied after a re-evaluation. Until 30 Aug 2026 this paragraph said each badge was “served as an SVG from our servers, so the score updates automatically”. That was the opposite of what the snippet below does, and it was the half a publisher would have relied on. A served badge is the better design and is on the roadmap; it is not what exists.
Embed snippet
Copy the snippet from your journal's profile page (Badge & Widgets tab) or from the Publisher Panel:
/journal/{id} and /badge/{id}.svg. This site is static .html with no
URL rewriting anywhere in the tree, so both routes 404 — a publisher who pasted it got a broken image linking to a
missing page, on their own homepage, in the slot reserved for a quality signal. Take the snippet from your journal’s
profile page or from the Publisher Panel: both now emit a self-contained inline SVG that needs no
file from us and keeps working if this site ever moves.<a href="https://www.citelink.org/journal.html?id=S12345678" rel="noopener">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="170" height="28" ... >
<!-- the whole badge, inline: no external file, no web font, no metric -->
</svg>
</a>
Live CLV widget
Beyond the static badge, the live widget renders your current CiteLink Value, quartile and the five-group breakdown directly on your journal's homepage. It is a single lightweight script tag, loads asynchronously, sets no cookies and tracks no visitors. When your CLV changes at re-evaluation, the widget updates the same day.
Widget preview (live demo data)
CiteLink Value 2025
Usage rules
- ✓ The badge or widget must link back to the journal's CiteLink profile page.
- ✓ Badges may be placed on the journal website, in email signatures and in print media (a print-resolution version is available in the Publisher Panel).
- ✕ The displayed score, quartile or wording must not be altered, cropped or obscured in any way.
- ✕ Badges may not be used by journals whose indexed status has lapsed or been withdrawn — embeds for de-indexed titles automatically render an inactive state.
- ✕ The badge may not be presented in a way that implies CiteLink endorses individual articles or authors.
Indexing certificate
Every indexed journal receives an official certificate, reissued after each annual re-evaluation. The certificate is a signed PDF stating the journal title, ISSN, publisher, the current CiteLink Value, the subject quartile (C1–C4) and the validity period. Editorial offices use it in accreditation files, ministry submissions and institutional reporting.
Each certificate carries a unique number, and a public verification URL is planned so anyone can confirm its authenticity without contacting us. Until it is live, write to us to verify one. Planned form:
https://www.citelink.org/verify/CL-CERT-2025-04871
Verified editors download the certificate from the Publisher Panel immediately after acceptance and after every re-evaluation.
Open API & OAI-PMH planned
All journal-level metadata in CiteLink is open, and the machine-readable interfaces below are how we intend to serve it — freely, with no key, no contract and no cost. They are not built yet; the specification is published early on purpose.
citelink.org/api or citelink.org/oai answers yet. The design is published in advance so libraries and aggregators can tell us what they need before it is built rather than after. What does answer today — the PostgREST routes this site’s own pages call, with the key they use and the limits measured against them — is documented separately on the machine-readable data page, so that nothing on this page has to be read as live.REST API v1 planned
Planned base URL: https://www.citelink.org/api/v1 · JSON over HTTPS · CORS enabled. In phase 1 the API serves journal-level records only; article-level discovery is planned for phase 2 (see the development plan).
| Method | Endpoint | Description | Key parameters |
|---|---|---|---|
| GET | /api/v1/journals |
Search and list indexed journals (paginated). | q (title/ISSN/publisher), subject, country, oa (diamond|gold|hybrid|subscription), min_clv, license, page, per_page (max 100) |
| GET | /api/v1/journals/{id} |
Full record for one journal, including the CLV breakdown across all five criterion groups. | id — CiteLink journal identifier or ISSN (e.g. issn:2149-3170) |
| GET | /api/v1/publishers |
List publishers with journal counts and profile links. | country, type (university-press|society|commercial), page, per_page |
| GET | /api/v1/rankings?subject= |
Annual subject ranking with CLV scores and quartiles. | subject (required, e.g. med, cs), year, quartile (C1–C4), page |
Example: journal record
GET /api/v1/journals/mediterranean-journal-clinical-research
{
"id": "mediterranean-journal-clinical-research",
"title": "Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Research",
"issn": "2149-3170",
"eissn": "2149-3189",
"publisherId": "zeus",
"publisher": "Zeus Publishing",
"country": "Türkiye",
"languages": ["English"],
"subjects": ["med"],
"oa": "gold",
"apc": 450,
"license": "CC BY 4.0",
"review": "Double anonymized",
"frequency": "Quarterly",
"founded": 2016,
"indexed": 2023,
"clv": 84.0,
"clvBreakdown": {
"A_editorial_ethics": 21.0,
"B_publication_stability": 8.0,
"C_digital_infrastructure": 30.5,
"D_internationalization": 12.5,
"E_transparency": 12.0
},
"quartile": "C1",
"doiPrefix": "10.5281/mjcr",
"orcid": true,
"cope": true,
"plagiarism": "iThenticate",
"archiving": ["LOCKSS", "CLOCKSS"],
"articlesPerYear": 96,
"website": "https://www.zeuspublishing.com/mjcr",
"profile": "https://www.citelink.org/journal.html?id=S0000000000",
"lastEvaluated": "2025-11-14"
}
OAI-PMH harvesting planned
For library systems and aggregators that prefer standard harvesting, indexed journals will be exposed through an OAI-PMH 2.0 data provider. Planned endpoint:
https://www.citelink.org/oai
Supported verbs and typical requests:
| Verb | Purpose |
|---|---|
Identify | Repository description, admin contact, granularity |
ListMetadataFormats | Available formats — oai_dc (Dublin Core) is always supported |
ListSets | Sets per subject area (e.g. subject:med) and per publisher |
ListRecords | Bulk harvest, e.g. ?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc |
ListIdentifiers | Headers only, for incremental harvesting with from/until |
GetRecord | Single record by OAI identifier |
Retry-After header. Reuse of the data requires attribution — “Data: CiteLink (www.citelink.org)” with a link — and CLV scores must be reproduced unmodified. High-volume integrators (national libraries, large aggregators) can request a higher limit at info@citelink.org.
Evaluation reports
Every application — accepted or not — ends with a written evaluation report, free like everything else a journal receives from us. We charge readers and institutions, never the journals we evaluate: a fee that depends on the outcome, or that makes delisting cost us money, would quietly corrupt the judgement it pays for.
Group scores
Your exact score in each of the five CLV criterion groups — Editorial Standards & Ethics (25), Publication Stability (10, up to −6 penalty), Digitalization & Technical Infrastructure (35), Internationalization (15) and Transparency & Verifiability (15) — with the criterion-level checklist behind every number, so you can see precisely where points were earned and lost.
Evaluator comments
Written observations from the subject-matter evaluators who reviewed your journal: what they verified on your website, which policies they could not locate, and how your practices compare with well-performing journals in the same field.
Improvement recommendations
A prioritized action list — typically five to twelve items — such as publishing a retraction policy, registering DOIs for back issues, adding ORCID collection at submission, or joining a digital preservation scheme. Journals that are not accepted may reapply once the findings are addressed.
Ready to put your journal on the map?
Application is free, the criteria are public, and you will receive a full evaluation report whatever the outcome.