Indexing is an important aspect of journal evaluation. It is the systematic hosting and cataloging of academic journals within scholarly databases, with journals needing to meet minimum technical and ethical standards to be accepted. Typical requirements include the production of high-quality scholarly content, a consistent publishing schedule, a rigorous peer review process, and transparent ethical policy documentation. What receives less immediate consideration, perhaps, is production quality.
Yet high production quality is essential within journal publishing, improving discoverability, accessibility, impact of scholarly content, and academic community perception and opinion. Here, we look at what major indexes evaluate, JATS XML, common production errors that cause indexing delays, and how journal production services such as JAMS can steer production quality in the right direction.
What major indexes actually evaluate
Major indexes such as Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed/PMC evaluate the scholarly value and integrity of academic journals by looking at certain indicators. For example, they may assess the journal impact factor (JIF) alongside a journal’s peer review processes, ethics policies, and quartile rankings to determine whether it is suitable for academic journal indexing.
Just as important, but often overlooked, is the technical layer: metadata consistency, DOIs, ORCID tagging, and file structure. In summary, the journal’s overall production quality.
Evaluations carried out by academic journal indexing teams assess whether journal content is provided in a format that meets the technical requirements. Issues such as missing DOIs and poor typesetting standout to evaluators and greatly impact on your chance of being indexed.
One thing that major indexes want to see from journals is consistent metadata provided in a machine-readable format. That’s where JATS XML comes in.
What is JATS XML?
Most major indexes require journals to directly provide content deposits. In these content deposits journals need to provide consistent article-level metadata, such as:
- Journal publisher
- Journal issue details (e.g., publication date and volume/issue number)
- Journal title
- ISSN
- Article title
- Author names
- Keywords
- Copyright license
- Digital Object Identifier
- ORCID iD
Importantly, all this information must be machine-readable to facilitate academic journal indexing.
JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) XML is a standardised, machine-readable format enabling publishers and indexes to exchange scholarly content. It provides a set of XML (Extensible Markup Language) elements and attributes that define the textual and graphical content of scholarly articles. A JATS XML file is produced for each journal article, containing the structured article and metadata to support indexing.
Why it matters
JATS XML is important because it provides a universal way of exchanging, ingesting, and preserving scholarly content. Major indexes mandate the use of JATS XML, meaning that journals have an established method to follow, which in turn limits the number of production errors made during the academic journal indexing process.
Beneficial to authors and readers, JATS XML also facilitates the discoverability of scholarly content, enabling search engines and databases to quickly scan article-level metadata and pull up the relevant article for the user. In the long term, this can drastically improve visibility and citation impact for articles.
Publishers are also able to generate multiple formats such as HTML and PDF using the JATS XML file, without having to reformat content. This significantly improves typesetting performance for journals.
Which indexes require it
JATS XML is the industry standard, so many major indexes require the use of it to smoothly process, preserve, and link article metadata and references.
Some of these major indexes include:
- Scopus
- Web of Science
- All NLM (National Library of Medicine) indexes: PubMed, PubMed Central, MEDLINE
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Google Scholar
Common production errors that cause indexing delays or rejections
Although JATS XML provides a standardised way of depositing scholarly content, production errors can still arise due to negligence or oversight on the journal’s behalf. Let’s look at some of the most common errors, and what journal production services like JAMS can do to help.
Malformed XML
JATS XML accuracy is crucial to academic journal indexing. XML errors arise due to files deposited by journals violating the structuring rules required for XML parsing. As a result, indexes and databases are unable to read the content efficiently, limiting retrievability and discoverability.
It is important for journals to remember that authors rely on journals to correctly take care of the XML conversion and process. And because it’s an industry standard, journals need to be able to handle such a process.
Journal production services such as JAMS don’t just help journals efficiently carry out XML conversion; they automate the process for them. Accepted papers in (Word or LaTex format) are returned as a formatted PDF along with full-text JATS XML, with 99.9% accuracy, ensuring journal typesetting and production quality standards are met.
Inconsistent metadata
Consistent metadata across platforms (journal website, ISSN portal, PDF, Crossref) is expected but not always guaranteed. Inconsistencies can arise, especially in manual workflows.
JAMS automatically compiles article metadata (such as dates, article title, authors’ names, and affiliations) into an XML file ready to upload directly to Crossref. As a result, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for your journal’s articles can be generated, allowing readers to reliably find and access the work.
For more information on DOIs, metadata, and XML batches, see our support page on how JAMS handles manuscript processing.