An index is a list of elements that are put together for a purpose. Journal indexes (also called bibliographic indexes or bibliographic databases) are journal lists organized by discipline, subject or publication type.
Journals included in a index are considered to be of better quality than non-journals. This is because journals must go through a review process to be included or indexed in reputable bibliographic databases.
Indexing is a criterion to be taken into account when choosing a journal to be published, together with the referee evaluation status and the journal effect.
Journal Indexing Databases and Search Engines
| Name | Discipline(s) | Description | Access cost |
| Academic Search[3] | Multidisciplinary | Several versions: Complete, Elite, Premier, and Alumni Edition | Subscription |
| Aerospace & High Technology Database | Aerospace, Aeronautics, Astronautics | Provides indexing and abstracts from current serial and non-serial titles, including content from AIAA and NASA | Subscription |
| African Journals OnLine (AJOL)[4] | Multidisciplinary | Scholarly journals published in Africa | Free & Subscription |
| AgeLine[3] | Sociology, Gerontology | Includes information on aging-related topics, including economics, public health and policy | Subscription |
| AGRICOLA: Agricultural Online Access[5] | Agriculture | Provides public access to information on agriculture and allied fields (17th century – present) | Free & Subscription |
| AGRIS: Agricultural database[6] | Agriculture | Covers agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences and fisheries, human nutrition, extension literature from over 100 countries. Indexes unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications. | Free |
| Airiti | Multidisciplinary | Chinese e-content provider of Chinese academic e-journals, Taiwanese academic e-journals, classical art images | Subscription |
| Analytical Abstracts[7] | Chemistry | Selection of analytical chemistry articles published by the Royal Society of Chemistry (around 100 journals) | Subscription |
| Analytical sciences digital library[8] | Analytical chemistry | A collection of peer-reviewed electronic resources on chemical measurements and instrumentation | Free |
| Anthropological Index Online[9] | Anthropology | Indexes only (no abstracts or full-text) the anthropology journals received by The Anthropology Library at The British Museum | Free & Subscription |
| Anthropological Literature[10] | Anthropology, Archaeology | An index of journals primarily from Tozzer Library, as well as other open-access journals (660 journals with more than 670,000 articles) | Free & Subscription |
| Arachne[11] | Archaeology, Art history | 2.4 million digital images from archive material, 1 million of books, 40,000 high quality scans of ancient sculptures, 300 volumes of ancient books with more than 60,000 pages | Free |
| ArchiveGrid | Multidisciplinary | Directory of archival materials from American and international institutions, including over five million records | Free |
| AMiner[12] | Computer Science | Online service used to index and search academic social networks | Free |
| Arts & Humanities Citation Index[13] | Arts, Humanities | Part of Web of Science. 1,800 journals across 28 arts & humanities disciplines. Records back from 1975 to present. | Subscription |
| ASCE Library | Civil Engineering | All civil engineering disciplines including structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering, construction engineering, environmental engineering, engineering mechanics, sustainability, water resources, irrigation. hydraulics, hydrology, waterways, urban planning, cold regions … | Free & Subscription |
| Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library | Computer Science, Engineering | Collection of all ACM publications, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters and books | Subscription |
| Astrophysics Data System[14] | Astrophysics, Geophysics, Physics | Publications in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and the arXiv e-prints | Free |
| ATLA Religion Database[15] | Religious studies | Provides information on topics such as biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religion in social issues | Subscription |
| AULIMP: Air University Library’s Index to Military Periodicals | Military Science | The articles, news items, book reviews and editorials from 63 English language military and aeronautical periodicals | Free |
| BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine[16] | Multidisciplinary | Metadata for 260 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers | Free |
| Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale | Medieval studies | A bibliography of monographs on the Middle Ages. As of 2018, it contains about 65,000 fully classified bibliographic records. | Subscription |
| Biological Abstracts[17] | Biology | Biomedical research literature published from more than 4,000 journals internationally. | Subscription |
| BioOne | Biology, Ecology, Environmental Science | Full-text from >180 scientific journals in Biodiversity Conservation, Biology, Ecology, Environmental Science, Entomology, Ornithology, Plant Science, and Zoology. | Free & Subscription |
| Book Review Index Online | Book reviews | Reviews of periodicals and books – including those on tape and electronic media | Subscription |
| Books In Print | Books | Reviews covering over 2.5 million titles | Subscription |
| CAB Abstracts | Applied life sciences | Bibliographic information service providing access to applied life sciences literature. | Subscription |
| Chemical Abstracts Service | Chemistry | Approximately 8,000 journals, technical reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, and new books | Subscription |
| Chinese Social Science Citation Index[18] | Social sciences | Covers about 500 Chinese academic journals of humanities and social sciences | Subscription |
| CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health[19] | Nursing, Allied Health | Journal articles about nursing, allied health, biomedicine and healthcare. Covers 5,500 journals (English and other language). | Subscription |
| CiNii[20] | Multidisciplinary | Database of articles in the Japanese language from 3600 journals | Free & Subscription |
| CHBD: Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database[21] | Medicine | Contains records describing publications about all aspects of human health in the circumpolar region | Free |
| CiteSeerX[22] | Multidisciplinary | Replaced CiteSeer, and ChemXSeer. Mainly Computer science, Statistics, Mathematics. | Free |
| Civil engineering database | Civil engineering | A bibliographic database covering all of ASCE’s publications since 1872 | Free |
| Cochrane Library | Medicine, Healthcare | Includes reviews of research to promote evidence-based healthcare. | Subscription |
| CORE[23] | Multidisciplinary | A full text aggregator of all open access papers from repositories (institutional, subject, preprints, etc.) and journals. Around 20 million monthly active users. | Free |
| Crossref[24] | Multidisciplinary | An official Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Registration Agency of the International DOI Foundation. Metadata about publications, datasets, grants, preprints from 17,633 members (journals, publishers, etc.) | Free |
| Current Contents | Multidisciplinary | Part of Web of Science. Contains 7 discipline-specific subsets. | Subscription |
| DeepDyve | Multidisciplinary | Commercial website that sells access to scientific and scholarly articles from a large range of academic publishers (over 1700 journals). Limited free access. | Free & Subscription |
| Dimensions[25] | Multidisciplinary | Publications, books and book chapters, preprints and conference proceedings (linked to data sets, funding, publications, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents). Based on CrossRef. Contains citation-based indicators and Altmetric attention scores. | Free & Subscription |
| Directory of Open Access Journals[26] | Multidisciplinary | Articles from 15,000 open access journals (Dec 2020) | Free |
| DBLP[27] | Computer science | Comprehensive list of papers from major computer science conferences and journals | Free |
| EconBiz[28] | Economics | Covers journals, working papers & conferences in business studies and economics | Free |
| EconLit[29] | Economics | Covers articles and other materials dating back to 1969 | Subscription |
| Ei Compendex | Engineering | Electronic version of Engineering Index | Subscription |
| EMBASE[30] | Biomedicine, Pharmacology | Biomedical database with a focus on drug and pharmaceutical research. Rrecords from over 8,500 journals (1947–present). | Subscription |
| ERIC: Educational Resource Information Center[31] | Education | Education literature and resources dating back to 1966. | Free & Subscription |
| Europe PMC[32] | Biomedical | Abstracts & full text ( 6.5 million) biomedical and life sciences articles (Dec 2020). Includes text mining tools and links to external molecular and medical data sets. | Free |
| FSTA – Food Science and Technology Abstracts | Food science, Food technology, Nutrition | The database of information on food science, food technology and nutrition | Subscription |
| GeoRef[33] | Geosciences | Records from 3,500 journals in 40 languages | Subscription |
| Global Health[34] | Public Health | Specialist abstracting and indexing database dedicated to public health research and practice. Contains scientific records from 1973 to the present. | Subscription |
| Google Scholar[1] | Multidisciplinary | The biggest academic database & search engine (over 390 million records, unofficial estimate) | Free |
| HAL | Multidisciplinary | An open-access database for French researchers. Organized into institution and domain portals. | Free |
| IEEE Xplore | Computer Science, Engineering, Electronics | Over 5 million records. | Subscription |
| Index Copernicus[36] | Multidisciplinary | Contains over 2,500 journals (including 700 journals from Poland). | Free |
| Information Bridge: Department of Energy Scientific and Technical Information | Multidisciplinary | Provides free public access to over 266,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy (DOE) research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward. | Free |
| Informit | Multidisciplinary | Australasian aggregator of bibliographic databases and journals | Subscription |
| IngentaConnect | Multidisciplinary | Covers articles from 13,000 journals | Free & Subscription |
| Indian Citation Index[37] | Multidisciplinary | Covers articles from 1100+ journals from India from scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences | Subscription |
| IARP[38] | Multidisciplinary | Open-access knowledge management system incorporating grants, publications, conferences in natural and social & behavioral sciences | Free |
| Inspec | Physics, Engineering, Computer Science | Contains records in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, information technology, manufacturing, production, and mechanical engineering. | Subscription |
| INSPIRE-HEP | Physics, (High Energy) | An open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP) (operates since the 1970s) | Free |
| International Directory of Philosophy | Philosophy | Contains information on university philosophy departments and programs, philosophical societies, research centers, journals, and philosophy publishers in the U.S., Canada, and approximately 130 other countries. | Free & Subscription |
| International Medieval Bibliography[39] | Medieval studies | A multidisciplinary bibliographic database covering Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the entire period from AD 300 to 1500 | Subscription |
| International Nuclear Information System (INIS)[40] | Nuclear Physics, Nuclear Energy, Medical Physics | A leading bibliographic and grey literature repository covering all areas of nuclear science and technology. | Free |
| International Philosophical Bibliography | Philosophy | Focus on the history of philosophy and continental philosophy. | Subscription |
| Internet Archive Scholar | Multidisciplinary | Focus on fulltext search of open access journals and conference proceedings | Free |
| J-Gate[41] | Multidisciplinary | J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global e-journal literature (articles from 58,000 journals) | Free & Subscription |
| JournalSeek | Multidisciplinary | Catalogues over 39,000 journals’ information (the description, aims, scope, journal abbreviation, journal homepage link, subject category and ISSN). | Free & Subscription |
| JSTOR: Journal Storage | Multidisciplinary | Journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines (1870–present) | Free & Subscription |
| Jurn | Multidisciplinary | Index property and open access journals in the arts, humanities, ecology, science, biomedical, business and economics. | Free |
| L’Année philologique | Classical studies | Over 860,000 bibliographical entries, including keywords, abstracts, and links to the full text. | Subscription |
| LexisNexis | Law | Electronic database for legal and public-records related information | Subscription |
| The Lens[42] | Multidisciplinary | Serves global patent and scholarly knowledge as a public good to inform science and technology enabled problem solving. | Free & Subscription |
| Lingbuzz | Linguistics | A free archive of linguistics articles, with a focus on syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology | Free |
| Linguamatics | Medicine, Healthcare, Patents | Interface for searching MEDLINE, ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA Drug Labels, PubMed Central, and Patent Abstracts. | Subscription |
| Logeion | Classical Studies | An open-access database of Latin and Ancient Greek dictionaries | Free |
| MathSciNet | Mathematics | Records from 650 math journals (early 1800–present) | Subscription |
| MEDLINE | Medicine, Healthcare | Easy-to-use interface to search and retrieve citations and abstracts from 5,200 journals via MeSH vocabulary | Free |
| Mendeley[43] | Multidisciplinary | Crowdsourced database of research documents. Over 100M documents uploaded by the researchers plus data from repositories (e.g. PubMed and arXiv) | Free & Subscription |
| Microsoft Academic[44] | Multidisciplinary | Covers publications from over 49,000 journals | Free |
| MyScienceWork | Multidisciplinary | Database includes more than 90 million scientific publications and 12 million patents. | Free |
| National Criminal Justice Reference Service | Criminology, Sociology | Abstracts of scholarly journal articles, agency and NGO reports, audiovisual products, and conference proceedings. | Free |
| National Diet Library Collection | Multidisciplinary | Japanese. Catalog for the National Library of Japan. | Free |
| OAIster[45] | Multidisciplinary | Covers records contributed by over 1,500 organizations | Free |
| OpenEdition.org | Humanities, social science | Offers four international-scale publication and information platforms in the humanities and social sciences (10661 books, 549 journals, 3793 blogs, 45591 events). | Free |
| OpenGray | Grey literature | Indexes European grey literature | Free |
| ORCID[46] | Multidisciplinary | An open and independent registry for contributor identification in research and academic publishing. List: biography, education, employment, works, grants, peer-review. Over 9.3 million profiles. | Free |
| Paperity[47] | Multidisciplinary | Aggregator of open access journals and papers (>15,000 journals) | Free |
| Philosophy Documentation Center eCollection | Applied ethics, Philosophy, Religious studies | Journals, series, conference proceedings, and other works from several countries online | Free & Subscription |
| Philosophy Research Index | Philosophy | Index of books, journals, disserations, and other documents | Subscription |
| PhilPapers | Philosophy | Index journals, books, open access archives, and personal pages maintained by academics | Free |
| POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials | Philosophy, applied ethics, religious studies | Journals and series, online access for institutions with print | Free & Subscription |
| Project MUSE | Humanities, social science | MUSE’s online journal collections are available on a subscription basis to academic, public, special, and school libraries. More than 2,500 libraries worldwide subscribe. | Subscription |
| PsycINFO | Psychology | Focus at behavioral science and mental health. Coverage 1887–present. | Subscription |
| PubMed[48] | Biomedical, life sciences | A database primarily of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. Includes MEDLINE, PubMed Central, and Bookshelf. | Free |
| PubMed Central (PMC)[49] | Biomedical, life sciences | Free full-text archive of publications and preprints | Free |
| Publons[50] | Multidisciplinary | Service for academics to track their peer review and editorial contributions for academic journals. Merged with ResearcherID | Free |
| PubPsych | Psychology | Datasets and offers, where available, full-text linking, links to additional information and link resolving | Free |
| Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature | Literature | Reference guide to articles in >470 periodical magazines and journals, organized by article subject (1890 to present) | Subscription |
| RePEc: Research Papers in Economics[51] | Economics | Working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components (including 1.2 million full-text articles) | Free |
| ResearchGate | Multidisciplinary | Commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers. Over 19 million registered users that share their articles, datasets and other research output. | Free |
| Rock’s Backpages[52] | Music | Primary documents from the history of rock and roll. Articles, including interviews, features and reviews, which covered popular music from blues and soul | Free & Subscription |
| Russian Science Citation Index | Multidisciplinary | A bibliographic database of scientific publications in Russian | Free |
| SafetyLit | Multidisciplinary | >35 distinct professional disciplines (architecture – zoology) relevant to preventing unintentional injuries, violence, and self-harm | Free |
| SciELO | Multidisciplinary | Database and a model for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries (mostly South America and Africa). Indexes >1700 journals. | Free |
| Science.gov | Multidisciplinary | A gateway to government science information and research results from over 60 databases, over 2,200 websites, and over 200 million pages. | Free |
| Science Citation Index[53] | Multidisciplinary | Part of Web of Science. 24,000+ journals across 254 subject disciplines. | Subscription |
| ScienceOpen | Multidisciplinary | Natural and physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Incorporates arXiv, PubMed, and SciELO. Integrated with ORCID Altmetric uids. Articles from >25,000 journals. | Free |
| Scientific Information Database (SID) | Engineering & Technology, Medical Science, Basic Science, Human Sciences | An Iranian index of academic journals and access to full text or metadata | Free |
| SCIndeks – Serbian Citation Index | Multidisciplinary | A bibliographic database, a national citation index, an Open Access full-text journal repository and an electronic publishing platform. Articles from >230 journals. | Free |
| Science Direct | Science including Medicine | Content from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books | Subscription |
| Scopus[54] | Multidisciplinary | Records from over 20,500 titles from over 5,000 international publishers | Subscription |
| SearchTeam | Multidisciplinary | Search together collaboratively for scholarly articles and resources | Subscription |
| Semantic Scholar | Multidisciplinary | Mostly computer science and biomedical publications. Powered by semantic analysis. | Free |
| SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Contexts) | Multidisciplinary | Directory of archival materials grouped by subject entity | Free |
| Social Science Citation Index | Social science | Part of Web of Science | Subscription |
| Socolar | Multidisciplinary | Scholarly open access resources in different language (mainly Chinese) | Free & Subscription |
| SSRN: Social Science Research Network | Social science | Research papers from more than 55 disciplines | Free & Subscription |
| Sparrho | Multidisciplinary | Research articles and patents from 45k+ journals and preprint servers. Uses content recommendation concept. | Subscription |
| SpringerLink | Multidisciplinary | Journals, books, series, protocols, reference works and proceedings | Free & Subscription |
| Unpaywall[55] | Multidisciplinary | Harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories | Free |
| Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory | Multidisciplinary | Provides serials for periodicals | Subscription |
| VET-Bib | Social Science, Education | European vocational education and training (VET) literature | Free |
| Web of Science[54] | Multidisciplinary | Includes other products, such as Social Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Biological Abstracts & The Zoological Record | Subscription |
| WestLaw | Law | Over 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources | Subscription |
| WorldCat[56] | Multidisciplinary | Unified catalog of member libraries’ catalogs | Free & Subscription |
| WorldWideScience | Multidisciplinary | A union catalog that itemizes the collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries | Free & Subscription |
| Zasshi Kiji Sakuin: Japanese Periodicals Index | Multidisciplinary | Scholarly articles in Japanese | Free & Subscription |
| Zentralblatt MATH | Mathematics | Mainly reviews and abstracts. | Free |
| The Zoological Record | Zoology | Unofficial register of scientific names & papers in zoology. Coverage 1864–present. | Subscription |
| DiVA (open archive) | Multidisciplinary | Mainly used by Swedish universities and research institutions. | Free |
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