SCIndeks Entities
SCIndeks accessories
Services
Tools & Protocols
Journals
SCIndeks Journals are Open Access in order to be globally visible and available to all. They are monitored, quality controlled, and evaluated within JBR, based on the performance achieved in SCIndeks, WoS/JCR, and Google Scholar. Journal management is heavily supported through SCIndeks Assistant, SCIndeks Repository, and Editor Service. All journals are promoted internationally through SCIndeks and, due to OAI-PMH metadata harvesting, through Google Scholar and other aggregators. Journals accepted in DOAJ through P&LSS are recognized as legitimate and trusted sources. Best of them are occasionally recommended for indexation in WoS, Medline, Scopus, and SEESAmE. To achieve all this, practically all services and tools integrated with SCIndeks are employed during the maintenance process. Among these, OAI-PMH, XML, and ORCID, are more utilized than others.
Editors
Editors are the driving force in accomplishing the mission of their journals and the guardians of academic values in published articles. Their main responsibilities lie with the journal’s publishing policy, quality control and self-evaluation. Therefore, almost all SCIndeks quality support instruments are indirectly intended to assist editors in exercising their role. Some of them, such as P&LSS, SCIndeks Assistant, Editor Service, and JBR, are dedicated to the editors in an exclusive and most direct way. At the same time, their professional portrait is presented in SCIndeks at multiple locations, including editors biosketch and ORCID, while their performance is monitored and assessed based on the performance of their journals, as evidenced partly in SCIndeks itself and, in full details, in JBR.
Reviewers
The quality and transparency of the peer review process are the important factors of journals achievement. This is why the journal reviewer lists are in SCIndeks published and regularly maintained for all fully indexed journals. Such practice is also encouraged by DOAJ’s admission criteria and ensured through P&LSS. The evaluation of the peer review reports using RevRev built in SCIndeks Assistant is also a part of journal quality control. In RevRev, the quality of each peer review is assessed by the Editorial Board, while its usefulness for the improvement of manuscripts is rated by their authors. The ratings are quantified and aggregated for all reviewers to be used for the purpose of training and selection. The transparency of the peer review process is one of the journal ranking indicators in JBR.
Authors
Authors in SCIndeks are made distinguishable by normalizing their affiliations using classification schema built into NormAll. This enhances recognition of authors not only in SCIndeks, but also in services of related aggregators (DOAJ, Google Scholar, and OpenAire). In journals using CrossRef through SCIndeks, authors’ ORCIDs are deposited in CrossRef along with other metadata. Such practice ensures the full identification of authors and further extends their visibility. PhD theses of authors cited in SCIndeks are made available through crosslinking with NaRDuS. Authors using SCIndeks Assistant are ensured with maximum comfort in manuscript submission and tracking. They are also provided, through CrossCheck, the protection against plagiarism, while Mind the Trap warns them of the existence of illegitimate citations.
Papers
The papers are the most valuable content of scientific databases. This is why they are archived in SCIndeks Repository in extenso, to be permanently available and fully searchable. Their visibility is boosted through DOI/CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other aggregators that harvest SCIndeks metadata. The originality of papers is being checked through CrossCheck, while their bibliometric quality is being improved by using multiple tools, notably NormAll, KwASS, RefFormatter, and CiteMatcher. The impact and usage of papers are monitored and evaluated within JBR.
Citations
Parsed and normalized citations is a distinctive feature of SCIndeks, making it a powerful evaluation instrument. Citation are treated as an important entity, both in SCIndeks and Google Scholar, and are controlled for accuracy and completeness through NormAll, Skriptor, and RefFormatter, based on authority databases (CrossRef, MEDLINE, VLS, etc.). Furthermore, they are controlled for legitimacy by Mind the Trap and CiteMatcher. As improved through this process, they become more exploitable for producing evaluation indicators, which is their main role. In JBR and elsewhere, citations are used as the basis for the evaluation of the most important SCIndeks entities, notably journals, papers, and authors.
Projects
Projects from which papers have been written and published are registered in SCIndeks whenever this information is available in the Acknowledgement section. This makes projects visible through SCIndeks. Their visibility is further increased thanks to OpenAire, which collects SCIndeks metadata through OAI-PMH. The names and codes of projects, as part of the metadata, are normalized using NormAll and FundRef. Local/national projects are additionally classified according to the funding streams. Joining project titles to papers in normalized form ensures the evaluation of performance of individual projects, as well as their groups/classes, both in terms of their productivity and impact.
Institutions
Authors’ affiliation institutions are promoted through authors’ papers and citations. Affiliations are normalized through NormAll based on the assigned internal institution ID in order to make the evaluation of institutions more reliable. In addition, the institutions that publish journals are monitored based on DOAJ and Editor Service and evaluated under JBR.
Funds
In SCIndeks, funder information are given in normalized form. This is ensured using NormAll and the funder unique identifiers available in FundRef, a register maintained by CrossRef. Assigning unique identifiers makes activities of funders transparent. It also opens the possibility of using SCIndeks for evaluation of funders efficiency in terms of number of papers published and citations obtained under their various programmes and projects during different time periods.
WoS - Web of science
An online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service, originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now maintained and published by Clarivate Analytics. The selection of journals covered by the service is guided by strict criteria of bibliometric quality and impact. Thanks to long tradition and rigour, WoS is considered the gold standard in journal evaluation worldwide. The evaluation results are published in the annual publication called Journal Citation Reports (JCR) which is a derivative of WoS.
Scopus
A bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations of scholarly literature. It is owned by Elsevier and is available online through subscription. The purpose and functions of Scopus are identical to those by Web of Science. Scopus is easier to navigate and covers more journals than WoS, but its selection and quality control are less rigorous.
MEDLINE - Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online
A citation bibliographic database containing metadata of articles from academic journals from medicine and related fields. Compiled by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), MEDLINE is freely available on the Internet and searchable via PubMed. Its master journal list is a synonym for journal quality in biomedical domain.
Google Scholar
A freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature. It is used as a citation index, but due to duplicate records from multiple sources, citation counts are not reliable. The additional deficiency of Google Scholar as a citation index is that it does not have a transparent journal selection policy and does not perform quality control.
SEESAmE - South East European Science Advanced through Evaluation
A multipurpose regional CRIS-like research information system containing the quality publishing support system, a full-text citation database, a tool for the evaluation and ranking of research entities, a comprehensive locator for research partners and reviewers. SEESAmE is fully operational but still in the process of development.
DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. As a source based on control and follow-up, DOAJ has become a de facto standard of quality. Moreover, in a European context, it is regarded as a sort of international certificate of legitimacy for OA journals.
OpenAire - Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe
A network of Open Access repositories, archives and journals. The OpenAIRE Consortium is a Horizon 2020 (FP8) project, aimed to support the implementation of the EC and ERC Open Access policies.
NaRDuS - National Repository of Dissertations in Serbia
The central national portal for PhD dissertations. All universities are obliged to deposit in NaRDuS, not only the dissertations and the basic information about them, but also the evaluation reports.
VLS - Virtual Library of Serbia
A parallel title for COBISS-SR, the co-operative online catalogue of Serbian libraries. COBISS-SR also stands for official website of the National ISSN Centre containing standard bibliographic descriptions of Serbian scientific journals.
ORCID - Open Researcher and Contributor ID
An alphanumeric code to safely and persistently identify authors of research products. This is a persistent identifier for humans, similar to digital object identifiers (DOIs) for Internet contents. ORCID is on the way to become a standard tool in research performance evaluation. Some most influential scientific bodies are considering the idea of requiring authors to have an ORCID in order to qualify for their grants.
CrossRef Similarity Check - Plagiarism Detector
A service helping journal publishers to prevent plagiarism by means of the text comparison tool called iThenticate. iThenticate compares a manuscript with all papers making a huge corpus of the world scientific production. It is a unique set of documents that includes the world's leading journals (gathered by CrossRef) that are not freely available on the Internet, and are therefore unavailable to the rival detection software tools. This makes iThenticate practically the only sufficient and exhaustive, and thus legitimate tool to detect plagiarism in scientific journals.
FundRef - Funder Registry
FundRef is a joint initiative to standardize the names of research funders and add grant numbers attributed in journal articles and other scholarly documents. The standardized names are given in the FundRef Registry, which is maintained by and can be downloaded from the CrossRef website. The FundRef unique identifiers are assigned to articles (in so-called Acknowledgments), due to which funding organizations are able to track the published results of their grants more efficiently, while research institutions are able to monitor the published outputs of their employees.
CrossRef-DOI - Digital Object Identifier
DOI is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. DOIs for journal articles are assigned by CrossRef. Thanks to association of the identifier (DOI) and the content (journal article) location of the content is secured and possible on just one-click. The link is maintained by CrossRef permanently; hence it is possible to locate the article even if it has been moved to a different Internet address.
Mind the Trap - References legitimacy checker
A CEON/CEES’s service for alerting authors of the presence of illegitimate references in their manuscripts. Mind the Trap processes the References section of the manuscript and marks visibly the references listed in its blacklist containing retracted/corrected papers, as well as papers published in fake, predatory, and suspected journals. The decision whether the checked reference should be discarded (and the related text be edited) or retained, is left to the authors of the manuscripts.
P&LSS - Policy&Licencing Support Service
A CEON/CEES’s service assisting editorial boards in defining and updating their publishing policies. The purpose of P&LSS is to assist editors in implementing policies that meet international publishing standards and good practices. It is primarily focused on new requirements for inclusion in DOAJ, in force since March 2014. P&LSS is developed and maintained by CEON/CEES exclusively for SCIndeks journals submitted to quality control.
Reviewing Reviewers - Assessment of reviewers
A tool built in SCIndeks Assistant to ensure standard assessment of peer reviews written at the editor’s demand. While editors rate the quality of reviews, authors evaluate reviewers in terms of their contribution to the improvement of submitted manuscripts. The tool quantifies and accumulates results for all reviewers and compiles an annual report that can guide the Editorial Board in training, ranking, and selecting reviewers.
NormAll - Normalizer of All Entities
A set of CEON/CEES’s tools to normalize information on author names, their affiliations, journal titles, cited references, projects, and funding institutions. Full normalization is a basic precondition for using information about SCIndeks entities for evaluation purposes. In the process of normalization various authority lists and databases are utilized and maintained regularly. SCIndeks itself is one of the normative databases.
Skriptor - Automated References Parser
A CEON/CEES’s tool exploiting a knowledge base and a set of simple rules to recognize author names, publication titles and other elements of references in order to store them in the different corresponding fields of a citation database. Parsing references is a necessary operation in citation indexes maintenance, since it ensures the accuracy and reliability of citations. It also makes it possible to reformat citations (as references) to fit various citation styles. In SCIndeks maintenance, Skriptor is used to process references that cannot be normalized by NormAll.
CiteMatcher - Citations-References Matcher
A CEON/CEES’s tool to ensure full congruence between references given in the reference list and citations in the body of the article. CiteMatcher analyses submitted manuscripts in order to locate in-text citations not listed in the References section, or conversely, the references given in the Reference list but not in the body of the article. The results are delivered to the authors and the editorial staff, to correct for the errors, either by editing the body of the article, or the Reference list.
RefFormatter - References Formatter
A CEON/CEES’s tool for parsing references in order to make their component parts (author, title, etc.) usable for evaluation purpose and transferrable into different citation styles. References are automatically matched with their original already parsed form, as given in reliable, normative databases, such as CrossRef, MEDLINE, SCIndeks, etc. During this and subsequent operations, references are parsed to be corrected, amended with missing the elements, and reformatted to meet the selected citation standard. The references that cannot be found by RefFormatter in any of the normative databases are left to the technical staff to parse them using Skriptor, or to the authors to correct them semi-automatically.
KwASS - Keywords Assignment Support System
A CEON/CEES’s software system to support the assignment of standard keywords to journal articles. KwASS combines:
(1) AKwA (Automatic Keywords Assignment), a tool that processes the English titles and abstract of papers to assign them the most informative descriptors extracted from a thesaurus of the editor’s choice and
(2) KeFiR (Keywords Final Refinement), a tool used by authors to accept or to ignore suggested KWs and, eventually, replace them with entries from the selected thesaurus that describe the content of the article more precisely.
OAI PMH - Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
A protocol for collecting metadata descriptions based on international standard Dublin Core and XML format/meta-language. Different journal aggregators widely use OAI-PMH for harvesting metadata about articles to create their own archives and databases for different purposes, thereby distributing the content of journals and increase their visibility on the Internet.
XML - Extensible Markup Language
A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human- and machine-readable. It has a form of platform-independent plain text. Thanks to this unique feature, XML (or markup languages derived from it) is massively used in data transfer.
Availability
SCIndeks is more than just a citation database. It is a platform to access not only titles, abstracts and other metadata but also the full texts of papers from all journals whose publishers opt for Open Access through SCIndeks. Full text availability is ensured through the SCIndeks Repository.
Visibility
Experience shows that visibility is a key that opens for journals the doors of international impact and reputation. In SCIndeks, various instruments are applied to boost visibility not only of journals and their contained papers and citations, but also of journal editors, reviewers, and even research projects.
Searchability
In SCIndeks, search is possible in simple and advanced mode using Boolean operators. In addition to abstracts and paper full texts, authors of both papers and citations are fully searchable. Journal search is ensured within Journal Bibliometric Report.
Normalization
In order to be exploitable in evaluation, authors' affiliation institutions, all cited references, project and funding information have to be normalized. The normalization is performed using relevant authority lists and databases.
Quality Control
SCIndeks journals undergo intensive quality control. The focus is on papers, but the activities of the editorial staff and reviewers are covered as well. Whenever possible quality enforcement mechanisms are applied. This approach is much more pronounced in journals published through SCIndeks Assistant. The efficiency of control is measured through the Journal Bibliometric Report.
Legitimacy
Legitimacy of journals is ensured by permanent follow-up of their ethical, publishing, and licencing policy implementation. Legitimacy of papers is checked in terms of their originality. As SCIndeks is a citation index, a special care is paid to the legitimacy of citations. Journals are systematically monitored to detect and prevent possible anomalous citation patterns, such as manipulative self-citing and excessive citation exchange (cartelling).
Promotion
SCIndeks is first and foremost a platform for promoting journals but it is also a means of promoting journal papers, their authors and affiliated institutions and, finally, projects and supporting funding institutions.
Monitoring
For the sake of their development, SCIndeks journals voluntarily submit themselves to the external monitoring carried out by CEON/CEES. The monitoring covers all online activities performed by editors, the editorial staff and reviewers. Editorial boards receive feedback in a quantified form through SCIndeks and the Journal Bibliometric Report.
Evaluation
For CEON/CEES as its publisher, SCIndeks is primarily an evaluation-supporting tool. Almost all SCIndeks entities are rated and, if appropriate, ranked. Most of them, notably journals, reviewers, authors, projects, institutions and funds are objects of evaluation, while others, such as papers and citations, are used as a means to evaluate other entities. Evaluation data are collected from SCIndeks including the SCIndeks Assistant, as well as from WoS, to be processed extensively and published in Journal Bibliometric Report.
SCIndeks Assistant
An online management platform based on OJS, reinforced with numerous quality-oriented tools and utilities. By opting to use the Assistant, editorial boards demonstrate readiness to pursue international quality, editorial transparency, and administrative efficiency.
Editor Service
A channel to provide technical support, expert opinions, and tailor-made solutions to the editorial boards of indexed journals. Also used for managing the SCIndeks Repository, subscription bookkeeping, and consulting with CEON/CEES on publishing standards and good practices.
SCIndeks Repository
The archive of full text papers published in indexed journals, securing permanent preservation of journals content. Also used for monitoring the usage of journals and individual papers. Maintained through the Editor service.
JBR - Journal Bibliometric Report
A cumulative annual report on the results of journals evaluation intended for journal publishers. About two dozen of different indicators of journal impact and bibliometric quality are calculated and and displayed tabularly and/or graphically.