Data report · websites read 12 October 2026
How often do journal websites’ indexing claims check out?
We read the websites of 5,706 journals in 14 subject areas and held what they say about their indexing against the lists this site holds. 1,521 of those sites name an index they are in. Of the 1,499 where we could check, 1,384 (92.3%) claimed only things our lists support. 115 (7.7%) made at least one claim our lists do not confirm or show as out of date. For Scopus, 98% of checkable claims held (1,109 of 1,135): 14 journals were not on our Scopus list and 12 had Scopus coverage that had ended.
By Vijayakumar P and Rani C. Totals only: no journal is named, and nothing here says any journal is anything other than what its own website says it is.
What “not confirmed” means
- “Not confirmed” means our lists do not show the claim. It does not mean the claim is false. Our copy of each list can lag the official one, and journals are added and dropped between releases. Check each claim on the official source.
- Half of the websites we tried refused the reader. The ones we could read are not a random sample: large publisher portals are under-represented. The 7.7% describes the sites we could read, not all journals.
- The 14 subjects are mostly business, social science and computing. Medicine, life sciences and engineering are not included yet.
The numbers
| What | Count |
|---|---|
| Journals in the 14 subjects with a website address | 12,966 |
| Websites we could read | 5,706 |
| Refused the reader (mostly large publisher portals) | 5,539 |
| Not reachable | 1,501 |
| Blocked by the site’s robots.txt | 220 |
| Readable sites that name an index they are in | 1,521 |
| Of those, claims we could check | 1,499 |
| With at least one claim not confirmed or out of date | 115 (7.7%) |
By index (claims we could check)
| Index | Confirmed | Not in our list | Coverage ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scopus | 1,109 | 14 | 12 |
| Web of Science | 738 | 47 | n/a |
| DOAJ | 572 | 43 | n/a |
| ABDC | 71 | 1 | 6 (dropped from the list) |
| ABS / AJG | 25 | 1 | n/a |
Some pages list several journals. Their claims are set aside as unreadable, which is why the rows do not add up to 1,499. Claims about PubMed (77 sites) and UGC-CARE (11 sites) cannot be checked against the lists held here.
Other things the readable sites show
308 give a free-email address (such as Gmail) as their main contact, 32 give a WhatsApp number, and 17 promise a first decision within two weeks. These are common and often harmless for small society journals. They are signals to look at, not findings about any journal.
A checklist for authors
- Treat “Scopus indexed” on a journal website as a claim to check, not a fact. Look the journal up on its Scopus record, with its coverage years.
- Check the ISSN on the page against the index’s own record.
- Tell apart “indexed in”, “listed by”, “abstracted in” and “under evaluation”.
- Be wary of a quoted “impact factor” for a journal that is not in Web of Science.
To look up a journal, use Article Indexes or the Journal Finder.
How we measured
- Reading: for each journal with a website address in the 14 subjects, we read its home page and up to two pages about fees or indexing, on 12 October 2026. The reader names itself, obeys robots.txt, asks one site for one page at a time, and leaves a site that refuses it.
- Claims: a claim is a sentence on the journal’s own site that says it is in Scopus, Web of Science, DOAJ, ABDC or the ABS guide. We compared each with this site’s lists, dated 4 October 2026, matching by ISSN.
- Subjects: business and management, human resources, marketing, finance, accounting, economics, tourism, operations, law, psychology, education, communication, social science and computing.
- For the dates of every source and the matching rules, see the methodology.