JournalJournals are usually rejected without ever learning why.
Journal analysis and consultancy services exist; but most stay on the surface, cost a lot, and details escape the human eye. In index applications the rejection reply is usually a few sentences — it never says which page, which missing statement.
Journal Evaluate was built for that gap: it audits your entire journal against evidence and puts the reasons for rejection in front of you before you apply.
Three solid
sources
Our criteria are a compilation, not a guess — structured from three sources:
The indexes' public criteria
The official application criteria of DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science and TR Dizin — followed to the letter and kept current.
A corpus of rejection reasons
A pattern catalogue distilled from hundreds of journals' rejection replies — we know what evaluators flag.
Publishing best practices
COPE principles, open-access standards and the established good practices of scholarly publishing.
Beyond generic
headings
We never say “have an ethics policy” — we show which sentence is missing on which page, with evidence.
From identity to licensing, ethics to archiving — every layer of your journal in a single audit, with honest levels instead of a score.
Next to every finding sits evidence taken from your own site with a clickable source link — no claim is printed without proof.
We don't say “fix it”; we write the text. Every action-plan item comes with ready-made wording you can paste into your site.
Re-scan at a discount as you fix things: resolved items get marked, new and regressed items are separated, and your progress accumulates in the report.
Every audit goes through a multi-stage review: the site is crawled in full and every finding is tied to evidence taken from your pages. Before a report is published it passes dozens of automated quality checks.
An honest
boundary
We state our limits as clearly as our strengths:
✗ We give no membership guarantee; we do not detect or confirm your membership status in any index.
✗ We don’t assign scores — “78/100” tells you nothing about what to do.
✓ We guide: we tell you where you stand and how to get there, with evidence. The final application decision and responsibility rest with the journal.
82 criteria,
15 areas
Below you see just ONE sample criterion from each area — the full list arrives in your report, each one assessed with evidence.
“Is the ISSN declared on the site and easily accessible from the homepage?”
“Is the contact information sufficient (responsible person, institutional email, full postal address)?”
“Does the journal declare a single, clear Creative Commons license (consistent at both journal and article level)?”
“Is it clearly and consistently stated on the site who retains copyright?”
“Is the fee policy clearly stated on the site (an explicit declaration of whether an APC is charged)?”
“Is the type of peer review (double-blind etc.) declared on the site?”
“Is a publication ethics page present and is its scope sufficient?”
“Are the institution and country information of board members complete?”
“Is the aims-and-scope statement clear, detailed, and does it define the target audience?”
“Are article titles/abstracts/keywords complete in the languages matching the journal's language profile?”
“Is DOI used, and is it applied with a single, consistent prefix across all articles?”
“Is an archiving policy page present?”
“Is the indexes page arranged categorically (index / discovery / identifier / archive distinction)?”
“Is the publication frequency declared, and has it actually been followed in recent issues (no late or early deviations)?”
“Are there any broken internal or external links on the site's pages (policy/menu/footer)?”
Evaluate your journal
Type your journal address — the system handles the rest.
Start the Audit →