and To make your article as easy to find as possible for other researchers within the same field it is important that it is indexed in relevant databases. For instance, if you are a researcher within the education field it is advantageous if the article can be found in a database like ERIC and if you are a researcher within the field of medicine or health science you want your article to be found in databases like PubMed, Medline and CINAHL. Another aspect is whether it is indexed in multidisciplinary databases such as Web of Science, Scopus or ProQuest Central. Furthermore, you might have an external requirement that you should publish your article in a journal that is indexed in Web of Science.
To find out in which databases a journal is indexed can be done in a couple of different ways. You might get that information through the journal's website or through catalogues like Ulrichsweb which contains detailed information on journals and other serial publications.
On the journal's website, you should find a link or a tab with the name like Indexing or Abstracting/Indexing. Click on that to get a list of databases that index the journal:
Sometimes the indexing information might be found among more general information about the journal:
Please note that sometimes they do not state the name of the database Web of Science but rather one or two of its sub-databases, or indexes as they are called. These indexes are:
Here is an example of this:
Ulrichsweb is a database, or catalogue, of journals and other periodical literature where you get information about different aspects of a journal (see more about Ulrichsweb under the section Tools to find journals). Here we will concentrate on the type of information that concerns database indexing.
The first thing we do is to search for the journal's name or its ISSN. Depending on how specific the search is (searching by ISSN is a more specific search for instance) you may sometimes get a lot of results, although the relevant are usually at the top of the search list. Each format of a journal (Print, Online etc.) gets an individual entry in the list but the bibliographic content is usually the same whichever you choose:
After having clicked on the title of one of the journal names we will find, a bit further down the bibliographic record, a heading called Abstracting & Indexing:
Under this heading, we will find the databases in which the journal is indexed. The list is ordered by publishers or companies that host the databases and under these names, we find the databases that index the journal. Some important names are Thomson Reuters (or Clarivate) which owns the database Web of Science (please note in the example below that they also state the specific indexes of Web of Science) and Elsevier which owns the database Scopus. Other names are database hosts, like EBSCOhost and ProQuest, and certain databases may be hosted by several database hosts.
