How to know if a journal is indexed in PubMed or Google Scholar? What's the difference?
What does indexing a journal means?
- It means the journal's bibliographic information, abstracts, and sometimes full texts have been added to the database, and by searching the databases, you will be able to find them.
- It also means some level of light quality check has happened for a journal to meet the criteria for being indexed in the database.
- Indexing on some databases also means human/machine/both have extracted/assigned or will extract/assign controlled vocabulary to each article to improve their retrieval/findability.
Why is it important for a journal to be indexed or for researchers to publish in these journals?
One word, visibility. The main and probably the only benefit of indexing journal or publishing in indexed journals is making your work visible. So if you can make your work publicly available and visible (indexed), you won’t need journals at all.
Of course, peer review is another process that is part of publishing in journals, but you don't need to publish in journals to have peers review your work! Some of the greatest academic works (including dissertations are…