“This journal is indexed in Scopus” appears on the homepage of legitimate journals and predatory ones alike. Indexing claims are one of the most commonly faked credibility signals in scholarly publishing, and the three databases researchers ask about most — DOAJ, Scopus, and Web of Science — are not interchangeable. Each one indexes a different scope of content, runs a different evaluation process, and being in one says nothing about whether a journal is in the others. This guide explains what each database actually does, how to verify a specific journal’s status directly rather than trust a claim on its website, and what indexing (and delisting) does and doesn’t mean for the work published in a given journal.
The short answer
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Scopus, and Web of Science are three separate, independently governed databases with three different jobs:
- DOAJ is a curated directory of open access journals that meet a baseline set of transparency and peer-review standards. It functions as a quality filter for OA journals specifically, not a citation database.
- Scopus (Elsevier) is a subscription abstract-and-citation database covering a broad, curated set of peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and books, evaluated by an independent editorial board.
- Web of Science (Clarivate), via its Core Collection, is a similarly curated citation database built from several component indexes of different selectivity, the best-known being the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE).
A journal can be indexed in any combination of these three — all three, none, or just one — and none of them guarantees that any individual article was rigorously peer reviewed. Indexing is an institutional-level signal about a journal’s editorial infrastructure and track record, checked at the journal level, not the article level.
Database comparison at a glance
| Database | What it indexes | Selection criteria | Cost to the publisher | Can journals be delisted? | Inclusion signals to check |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DOAJ | Open access journals only, across all disciplines and languages. Article-level metadata for indexed journals, not full text. | Application reviewed against DOAJ’s published criteria: a functioning journal website, a registered ISSN, an editorial board of at least five members, peer review by at least two independent reviewers, a clear OA licensing statement, published fee information, and a minimum publishing history (at least 5 articles/year, or one year of publishing / 10+ OA articles for new titles). | Free to apply and be listed. DOAJ does not charge journals to be indexed. | Yes. DOAJ removes journals that stop meeting criteria, fail to respond to update requests, or are found to have misrepresented their practices. | Search the journal directly at doaj.org rather than trusting a “DOAJ indexed” badge on the journal’s own site — badges are trivially easy to fake or leave up after removal. |
| Scopus | Peer-reviewed journals, trade publications, conference proceedings, and books, across science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. | Evaluated by Scopus’s Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) against five categories: journal policy (editorial approach, peer-review type, geographic diversity of authors/editors), content (academic contribution, scope fit), journal standing (citation performance, editor reputation), publishing regularity, and online availability/homepage quality. Baseline technical requirements (peer review, ISSN, regular publication schedule, a public ethics/malpractice statement) must be met before substantive review. | Free for the journal to be evaluated and indexed — Scopus does not charge journals a listing fee. (Individual open access journals may separately charge authors an APC; that is unrelated to Scopus indexing.) | Yes. Re-evaluation is triggered either by community-reported concerns (ethics or integrity issues) or by Scopus’s own outlier-detection models flagging unusual citation/publication patterns. Content flow is suspended during re-evaluation, and discontinued journals face an embargo on resubmission — content already indexed remains searchable as a matter of scientific record. | Check Scopus’s official source list (updated periodically and searchable via Scopus itself or Elsevier’s source-title list) rather than a journal’s self-reported claim. |
| Web of Science | The Core Collection bundles six indexes of different scope and selectivity: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index, and Book Citation Index. | Clarivate’s editorial team evaluates prospective journals against a documented set of quality criteria (publishing standards, ethical practices, international editorial diversity, peer review, and English-language bibliographic information, among others) for entry, typically starting in ESCI. Continued or expanded coverage in the more selective indexes (SCIE, SSCI, AHCI) additionally weighs citation impact and influence within the journal’s field over time. | Free for the journal to be evaluated and indexed — there is no Clarivate listing fee for inclusion. | Yes. Journals can be removed from Core Collection indexes for editorial-integrity concerns, citation-pattern anomalies, or failure to sustain the quality criteria that got them included. | The Master Journal List (mjl.clarivate.com) is Clarivate’s own searchable, authoritative record of exactly which index a journal sits in — this is the only reliable way to confirm Web of Science status, since “Web of Science indexed” is sometimes used loosely to mean any of the six indexes, which vary enormously in selectivity. |
For a closer look at how the Scopus discontinuation process specifically works, see Why and How Scopus Delists Journals and Why Journals Get Delisted From Web of Science. For a step-by-step Web of Science lookup walkthrough, see Is a Journal Indexed in Web of Science? How to Check and What It Means.
DOAJ: the open access quality baseline
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is not a citation database and does not compute impact metrics. Its purpose is narrower and, for open access publishing specifically, more foundational: it is a curated list of OA journals that have demonstrated they meet a baseline set of editorial-transparency and quality standards, and it is widely used by funders, institutions, and researchers as a first-pass filter for whether an OA journal is legitimate.
DOAJ tightened its application criteria in 2014, requiring far more detailed information from applicants (editorial board composition, licensing terms, peer-review process, fee structures) than its earlier, lighter-touch criteria had asked for, and required previously-listed journals to reapply under the new standard. Journals that did not reapply, or that reapplied but no longer met the tightened criteria, were removed from the directory. That reapplication process is one reason DOAJ inclusion carries real weight as a signal today: it is not simply a static list a journal joined once and kept indefinitely, and DOAJ continues to remove journals that stop meeting its standards or are found to have misrepresented their practices.
DOAJ inclusion is not a peer-review guarantee. DOAJ requires a journal to state it practices peer review with at least two independent reviewers and to describe that process, but DOAJ does not independently audit the rigor of every review decision the journal makes. It verifies that the editorial infrastructure and stated policies exist and are transparent — a necessary but not sufficient condition for editorial quality. A journal can meet DOAJ’s criteria and still publish inconsistently rigorous review, which is why DOAJ listing is best read as “this journal has passed a legitimacy and transparency check,” not “every article here received strong peer review.”
Scopus: broad, editorially curated coverage
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract-and-citation database, competing directly with Web of Science but built and governed independently, with its own selection process and its own journal-level metric (CiteScore, distinct from the Journal Impact Factor). New and existing titles are reviewed by the Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB), a panel of subject-matter experts organized by discipline, using both quantitative and qualitative measures.
Beyond the five evaluation categories in the table above, two mechanisms keep already-indexed journals under ongoing review: researchers or institutions can flag ethics or integrity concerns directly to Scopus, and Scopus’s own data models watch for outlier patterns — unusual spikes in self-citation, citation stacking between a small group of journals, or abnormal publication volume — that often precede a finding of compromised editorial control. A flagged journal’s content flow into Scopus is suspended during re-evaluation. See Getting a Journal Indexed in Scopus: The CSAB Process for the initial-application side of this in more depth.
Web of Science: six indexes, not one list
Web of Science, owned and operated by Clarivate, is often discussed as though it were a single index, which causes real confusion when checking a journal’s status. The Core Collection is actually six separate indexes of very different selectivity. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) is the entry point for journals that meet Clarivate’s baseline editorial-quality criteria but have not yet been evaluated for (or granted) promotion into the more selective, longer-established Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), or Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) — the three indexes most people mean when they say a journal is “in Web of Science” in the sense that carries the most weight for tenure, promotion, and funder-reporting purposes. A journal can be Web of Science indexed in ESCI without being in SCIE, and the distinction matters to anyone using indexing status as an evaluation criterion.
Because “Web of Science indexed” is ambiguous across those six indexes, the only reliable way to confirm status — and which specific index a journal sits in — is Clarivate’s own Master Journal List, not a claim on the journal’s website.
Where PubMed, MEDLINE, and PubMed Central fit in
Biomedical researchers frequently ask whether a journal is “indexed in PubMed,” and the three related NLM (National Library of Medicine) resources are commonly conflated even though they serve different functions:
- MEDLINE is NLM’s curated bibliographic database of biomedical literature. Journal selection for MEDLINE is, in NLM’s own description, a rigorous, multi-step process that assesses a journal comprehensively — editorial policies, scope, peer-review practices, and production quality — rather than against a single pass/fail checklist. Being MEDLINE-indexed is the closest biomedical equivalent to Web of Science’s SCIE or a comparably selective index.
- PubMed is NLM’s free search interface, and it is broader than MEDLINE alone: it includes MEDLINE citations plus additional content such as PubMed Central articles, ahead-of-print and in-process citations, and some journals and article types that are not MEDLINE-indexed. A journal can have some articles searchable in PubMed without the journal itself being MEDLINE-indexed.
- PubMed Central (PMC) is a separate, free full-text archive, not a citation index. Deposit in PMC (including as required by the NIH Public Access Policy and similar funder mandates) is a full-text-availability requirement, independent of whether the journal is MEDLINE-indexed. A journal can be in PMC without being in MEDLINE, and vice versa.
In practice: “MEDLINE indexed” is the meaningful selectivity claim for a biomedical journal’s editorial standing; “in PubMed” and “in PMC” describe searchability and full-text availability, which are related but distinct questions.
How to actually check whether a specific journal is indexed
Don’t rely on a badge, logo, or sentence on the journal’s own website — these are exactly the claims predatory and low-quality journals fabricate most often, sometimes copying a legitimate database’s logo outright or claiming an index they were removed from years earlier. Check the database directly instead:
- DOAJ: search the journal title or ISSN at doaj.org. If it’s listed, DOAJ shows the date it was accepted.
- Scopus: search Scopus’s source list (via a Scopus subscription, or Elsevier’s publicly downloadable Scopus source-title list) by ISSN — ISSN is more reliable than title, since journal titles change and are sometimes reused.
- Web of Science: search by title or ISSN at Clarivate’s Master Journal List, and note which specific index (ESCI vs. SCIE/SSCI/AHCI) the result shows — this distinction is usually the actual answer to “does this matter for my purposes.”
- MEDLINE/PubMed: search NLM’s Journal list in NLM Catalog to confirm MEDLINE indexing status specifically, rather than inferring it from articles appearing in a PubMed search.
Cross-check the ISSN itself against issn.org if there’s any doubt — some predatory journals register a similar but not identical ISSN to a legitimate journal’s, or list an ISSN that doesn’t resolve to them at all. See ISSN vs. eISSN for how the identifier itself works.
What a fake or outdated indexing claim looks like
Because indexing status functions as a trust signal, it’s a frequent target for misrepresentation. Common patterns worth watching for: a journal displaying a database’s logo without a live, verifiable listing; a journal claiming an index it was previously in but has since been delisted from (the claim isn’t technically fabricated, just stale, which is why checking the live database rather than the journal’s own page matters); and journals citing a Journal Impact Factor or “indexing” from a look-alike, non-authoritative metric or directory designed to resemble a recognized one. Tools built specifically to help researchers evaluate journal legitimacy — rather than relying on the journal’s own claims — are covered in DOAJ vs. Beall’s List vs. Think.Check.Submit, and general source-evaluation practice is covered in What Is a Scholarly Source? and the CRAAP test.
What delisting means for work already published
When a journal is delisted or discontinued from Scopus, Web of Science, or removed from DOAJ, the change is forward-looking, not retroactive, in one important sense and genuinely consequential in another. Articles already published in that journal remain part of the scientific record — they don’t disappear, and their DOIs continue to resolve. Scopus explicitly retains previously-indexed content from discontinued titles “as a matter of scientific record” rather than purging it. But delisting does change how that work is treated going forward: new citation data from the journal stops accruing in the database, the journal’s articles typically stop counting toward author-level metrics computed from that database, and — practically — a delisting is a strong retrospective signal that anything published in the journal around the time of the concerns that triggered re-evaluation deserves closer individual scrutiny, even though the delisting itself doesn’t invalidate any specific article. Researchers who published in a subsequently-delisted journal should expect to field questions about it in tenure, grant, or hiring review, and should be prepared to speak to the specific article’s own merits rather than relying on the journal’s indexing status at the time.
Why this matters beyond bragging rights
Indexing status has real downstream consequences for a research administrator or researcher to track, beyond signaling journal quality:
- Funder and institutional policy compliance. Some funder mandates and institutional promotion criteria reference specific databases (for example, requiring publication in a MEDLINE-indexed or Web of Science Core Collection journal) rather than “peer-reviewed” alone.
- Discoverability. A journal outside all three databases is genuinely harder for other researchers to find through standard literature searching, independent of its actual quality.
- Bibliometric standing. Citation counts, h-index, and journal-level metrics like CiteScore or the Journal Impact Factor are only computed from articles the relevant database has indexed — publishing outside these databases means that work is effectively invisible to those specific metrics, whatever its real influence.
- Due-diligence for authors choosing where to submit. Checking a target journal’s actual, current indexing status — rather than trusting its own claims — is a basic and fast part of vetting a journal before submission, alongside checking its publisher, editorial board, and peer-review policy.
Frequently asked questions
Is DOAJ the same as an impact factor or citation database?
No. DOAJ doesn’t compute citation counts or an impact metric at all — it’s a curated directory confirming a journal meets open access and editorial-transparency standards. Scopus (CiteScore) and Web of Science / Clarivate (Journal Impact Factor, via Journal Citation Reports) are the citation databases that compute journal-level metrics.
Can a journal be indexed in DOAJ but not Scopus or Web of Science?
Yes, and this is common, especially for newer, regional, or smaller-circulation open access journals. DOAJ’s bar is about editorial transparency and OA legitimacy, not citation impact, so a journal can clear it well before it has the citation track record Scopus or Web of Science’s more selective indexes look for.
Does being indexed in Scopus or Web of Science mean a journal is not predatory?
It’s a strong negative signal against predatory status, since both databases run an independent editorial review before inclusion and continue to monitor indexed journals, but it is not an absolute guarantee — journals have occasionally been indexed and later found to have compromised editorial practices, which is exactly what the re-evaluation and delisting processes exist to catch after the fact.
How long does it take for a new journal to get indexed?
There’s no fixed timeline in any of the three databases, and each requires a publishing track record before a journal is even eligible to apply — DOAJ requires at least a year of publishing history or 10+ OA articles; Scopus and Web of Science’s more selective indexes typically expect a longer, more established track record, though Web of Science’s ESCI is designed as a faster, lower-bar entry point for newer journals under evaluation.
What’s the difference between “indexed in PubMed” and “MEDLINE indexed”?
PubMed is NLM’s search interface and includes more than MEDLINE alone (PubMed Central content, ahead-of-print citations, some non-MEDLINE journals). MEDLINE indexing is the more selective, rigorously evaluated status; a journal appearing in PubMed searches is not automatically MEDLINE-indexed.
Journal indexing criteria and processes are reviewed and revised periodically by each database. This page reflects DOAJ, Scopus, and Web of Science policy as publicly documented as of August 2026; always confirm current status directly against the live database (doaj.org, Scopus’s own source list, or mjl.clarivate.com) rather than this page or any journal’s self-reported claim.
