Only scholarly journals are covered by the evaluation. The decision whether a journal may be considered a scholarly journal is a result of a special assessment and selection procedure known as screening. The journals indexed in the national citation index (SCIndeks) are automatically included in the evaluation.

There is no need for a formal application. All journals indexed in the national citation index are automatically included in the evaluation process. Other journals are included by the JBR publisher's decision. Journal publishers may only submit a request to be exempt from the evaluation. The JBR publisher is not obliged to comply with such requests.

The Journal Bibliometric Report is compiled and published once a year. It is published at its permanent URL http://bic.ceon.rs. The presented results apply to the previous calendar year. The previous editions of the JBR, beginning with 2002, are also available.

The analyses track the performance of journals in the Web of Web of Science (WoS) Scopus/Scimago, DOAJ, and SCIndeks: Serbian Citation Index. The corpus for analysis includes all papers, as well as all references/citations from all papers published during the analyzed year.

Issues published after the deadline that is common in publishing (the end of the first quarter of the following year) cannot be included in the analysis, as this is technically not feasible.

This is true, but this is beyond our responsibility. Our bibliometric report rests on the doctrine of scientometrics as a research field. In scientometrics, the practice of evaluating the quality of papers based on the quality (impact) of the journals in which they are published is not considered to be fully justified. It is certainly better to evaluate individual papers directly, i.e. by counting citations received by individual papers, the more so because this information is available in the same databases that offer journal citation rates. The citation rates, as well as the number of visits and the utilization (downloads) of individual papers are measured in SCIndeks daily.

It is true that the evaluation approach used in our Journal Bibliometric Report is similar to that applied in the WoS/JCR. This is because both are rooted in the same research field, scientometrics. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the implementation of this approach, primarily due to the specific features of journal publishing in small countries, such as Serbia. Therefore, in the JBR, the bibliometric quality and the compliance with international publishing and ethical standards are added to the list of evaluation indicators, and assessed in greater detail than in any known journal evaluation system. We are aware that every detail of our methodology may be subject to discussion. However, we believe that this discussion should follow the lines along which the system has been developed, i.e. it should be conducted using a research and development methodology. Scientific scrutiny and critique play an important role in this process. You may publish your critical review of our methodology in any journal. This would serve the general interest, especially because we would certainly not fail to respond to your criticism.

According to the scientometric doctrine, journals’ performance in general, including locally published journals, can be evaluated only on the basis of citation databases that rely on a publicly available quality control system and a defined corpus for evaluation, i.e. those which include all issues and all papers published in the indexed journals ("from cover to cover"). Despite some flaws, the international citation databases used by us are the only products with a global coverage. Their incompleteness and bias, especially in some fields of science, are made up for by SCIndeks, as a national citation index, which is used for evaluation in the JBR, as well.

ERIH, or ERIH PLUS, is a journal register, and not a bibliographic database. Its publisher does not subject the listed journals to quality control, nor are they subject to rating and ranking. For these reasons, ERIH cannot be legitimately used as a preferential list for journal evaluation. A detailed explanation of this position can be found in at least two documents on the CEON/CEES’s website.

Screening is a procedure for assessing and selecting journals for indexing in SCIndeks and their evaluation in the Journal Bibliometric Report. Screening is performed according to the General criteria for selecting journals for indexing defined by the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES). The criteria rely on the Act on Editing Scholarly Journals adopted by the national ministry responsible for science and the project Serbian Citation Index, approved by the Ministry, based on the opinion of the scientific committees for individual research fields (at that time, expert commissions).

A request for screening is assumed as a part of the SCIndeks application procedure, submitted by filling out the Order form in the SCIndeks Editor Service (My Journal). The journals are assessed based on the information provided in the Order form and the electronic versions of the published issues deposited in the SCIndeks Repository, or published on their web page. It is estimated to what extent they meet specific requirements defined in the Act on Editing Scholarly Journals. The decisions are made by the Assessment Board. The procedure is described in full detail in a separate CEON/CEES working document entitled General criteria for selecting journals for indexing.

No. During the screening, it is determined whether a journal publishes scientific content or not, while the JBR focuses on the journal’s performance. In the former case, the focus is on formal conditions, and in the latter on the journal’s real performance, which is reflected in its impact and the so-called bibliometric quality.

Unlike ours, your assessment may be biased. The Assessment Board has no reason to favour or disfavour any journals. The only motive guiding the Board is the urge to protect the quality of SCIndeks as a database that globally promotes local scientific results and, at the same time, serves as a basis for evaluation. There are a large number of criteria to ensure this, and their significance is unequal. The relevance of certain criteria partly depends on the journals’ subject and scope. Please examine carefully the Act on Editing Scholarly Journals and the requirements set out in our General criteria.

This is possible. The criteria for indexing are becoming increasingly stringent, as a result of the rapid development of scholarly publishing at the global level, and in Serbia, as well. Some journals that have been indexed in SCIndeks for a long time do not fully meet all the requirements but they have already achieved some impact and status. Keep in mind that such journals are nevertheless notified of the issues that need to be resolved, and in case of major disregard of the requests, suspended or removed from the list of evaluated journals.

Yes. Generally speaking, the screening is done once a year, but if you are sure that all the issues have been resolved already in the next issue, please submit it for reassessment. The assessment will be made based on the submitted issue, but taking into account the previous negative assessment.

According to the Rules on Procedure and Method of Evaluation and Quantitative Expression of Scientific Research Results of Researchers (Official Gazette of Serbia 38/17 of 21 April 2017), journals are evaluated based on their impact and bibliometric quality. Details are available in the Journal Bibliometric Report under Help.

The number of citations shown in the JBR ranking table is the total number of citations received in SCIndeks and the WoS, regardless of the cited papers’ publication years, while the CEON/CEES Impact Factors Two and Five are calculated based on the number of citations received only for the papers published in the previous two or five years, respectively.

• this would significantly increase the evaluation costs and
• it is difficult to determine which monographs should be considered scientific

• it is globally accepted and used by the publisher of the WoS in the Journal Citation Reports;
• it was also used in the JBR for determining the journal rating in the past;
• it is reasonable to keep on calculating both indicators in order to ensure an insight into their variations throughout the period of journal monitoring; and
• this indicator is useful in research fields where the literature is quickly becoming obsolete.

The journal must be evaluated in the Journal Bibliometric Report in order to be rated. The most efficient way to obtain a tier in the JBR is to have the journal indexed in SCIndeks, since this means that it meets the screening criteria. However, even in this case the journal is required to comply with international publishing and ethical standards.

The journal tier is determined based on multiple criteria including the regularity (timeliness) of publishing, the indicators of impact, measures of bibliometric quality and the degree of compliance with publishing and ethical standards. The procedure is described in detail in the Help, under Journal rating.

It is currently not used, although it was used in the past for more than a decade. Our rating within the 2016 JBR edition and all indicators on which it is based are primarily intended for journal publishers and editorial boards. Other user groups are listed in the Help under Purpose. We are confident that our rating is more defendable on scientific and doctrinal grounds and, as such, more appropriate in portraying journals, provided it is indicated that it is obtained by CEON/CEES or in JBR.

Yes, provided that your journal is subject to quality control (SCIndeks Assistant). Regardless of such requests, CEON/CEES, as the publisher of the JBR, occasionally recommends a small number of the most successful SCIndeks-indexed journals for indexing in the world's leading databases.

It is impossible to know whether a journal has ceased publishing or is only temporarily unable to keep to a regular publishing schedule. The requirements for determining a tier are still met even when a journal ceases publishing since it continues to receive citations from active journals. It is only impossible to determine its ranking based on the bibliometric quality indicators, and, therefore, it cannot be awarded any of the (higher) tiers that are determined based on these indicators. The journal ceases to be evaluated in the new editions of the JBR after five years have expired since the publication of the last issue.

The journal tier awarded to the journals by the Ministry does not oblige us in any way. There are a large number of journals that have been rated in this way, although it is evident that they do not meet the requirements defined in the Act on Editing Scholarly Journals. Our rating criteria are in compliance with this regulation of the Ministry, as well with international standards, and are not necessarily in accord with individual decisions of the Ministry.

Complaints regarding the JBR, including reporting errors, are submitted only by e-mail, to [email protected] (COMMENTS button in the main menu). Answers are delivered via the same channel, as soon as possible. If an error check requires analytical work or covers sources that are not directly available to us, the deadline for the response is ten days. We are unable to resolve complaints by phone. Oral consultations, either in-person or by phone, can be provided only to the editorial staff of SCIndeks journals, as part of our contractual obligation regarding technical support.

Whether a WoS error will be corrected or not depends on where it originated and who is responsible for it. So far, five types of errors have been identified:

1. Errors made by authors when citing a journal incorrectly, most commonly using an illegitimate, freely translated title. The WoS citations of local journals are counted by searching all forms of the journal's title, both full and abbreviated. Titles are reliably determined if they are listed in the ISSN online database. We also manage to discover a number of incomplete and illegitimate but commonly used versions of titles. If your journal is completely omitted from the reference list or is cited in an unrecognisable form, such error cannot be corrected.
2. Errors made by WoS operators, most commonly due to the failure to identify a journal title in the Serbian language among the cited references, although it is correctly cited in the paper. Such errors are not corrected. They are not taken into account even if they are subsequently corrected in the WoS at the request of a journal, since it would be illegitimate to do so only in the case of journals that submitted a correction request to the Wos, and not for other, competing, journals.
3. Errors arising from delays in indexing the issues published in the current year in the WoS. The corpus for counting citations received by Serbian journals in a given year comprises all references from all papers indexed in the WoS during the analyzed year and the first quarter of the following year. Some issues become available in the WoS after the expiration of that period. It is technically impossible to identify the citations that local journals receive in these issues. It is also impossible to add them to the previously received citations, since the bibliometric analysis is done only once a year. Finally, they cannot be added to the citations received by the journal during the following year, as they already belong to the previous year. Therefore, such errors are not corrected.
4. Errors made by our operators while retrieving data in the WoS in order to count citations received by local journals. Such errors are corrected. It is noteworthy that they are so few in number that in no case so far have they practically affected the journals' status, i.e. the journal rating.
5. Errors caused by omitting citations in SCIndeks. Such errors are corrected, although this should be done in SCIndeks, immediately after the data input, or before the end of the calendar year. We would like to point out that such errors are extremely rare and, so far, they have not had any practical consequences.

Not necessarily, as some errors of this kind are corrected in the process of normalizing references. As this may not happen, it is strongly recommend to submit a correction request through My Correction on My SCIndeks page. The procedure for filing correction requests is described in the SCIndeks Help, under My Correction. To report an error, you must be a registered user. If the error is apparent, it will be corrected as soon as possible. If the correction is made before the beginning of our bibliometric analysis, the initial error will not be reflected in the JBR.

Report the error to the WoS. If an error has occurred in the WoS, it is highly probable that it will be corrected. The details regarding correction requests in the WoS can be found on the article view page. If the correction is made before the beginning of our bibliometric analysis, the initial error will not be reflected in the JBR.