Evaluation of the readiness of Iranian English language journals of technical and engineering for indexing in international citation databases

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the readiness of Iranian English language journals of technical and engineering for indexing in international citation databasesMethodology: This research is applied in term of purpose and descriptive-survey in term of data collection method. The population of study is those Iranian English-language journals in the technical and engineering field which are not indexed in Web of Science and Scopus Databases. The number of these journals is equal to 57. Findings: The findings of the research showed that out of 57 studied journals, only 9 journals did not provide printed or electronic International Standard Serial Number. Also, 61.40 percent (35 cases) of the journals had delays in the publication of the journal issues. All the journals had peer-review process. Regarding policy criteria, 6 journals did not have geographical diversity in term of contributing authors and 2 journals did not have international editorial boards. In terms of access criteria, 8 journals did not have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for articles and 2 journals did not provide the possibility of getting Endnote output for journal articles, and the rest of the criteria were met by all journals. In terms of position criteria, 14 journals did not have a profile in Google Scholar, and therefore their H-index and received citations were not available.Conclusion: An important weakness of most engineering journals was the delay in the publication of journal issues. A relatively favorable situation was observed in the rest of the criteria.

Keywords

• journals
• engineering journals
• citation databases
• indexing
• evaluation of journals