How do you evaluate journals for inclusion?

The ADS evaluates all journals for coverage using the criteria listed below. We seek comprehensive, but not all-inclusive, coverage of the field of astronomy, and we take into consideration relevancy of content, standards of presentation, and regularity of publication. We evaluate journals on an ongoing basis and add or delete journals regularly. ADS reserves the right to exclude content deemed inappropriate for its collection or inconsistent with its editorial policies. To be accepted for coverage, a journal must:

• Be relevant to astronomy
• Be of a quality and scope of interest to an international audience
• Have an ISSN
• Be registered with CrossRef
• Follow standard conventions for scholarly journals
• Have an informative title and descriptive article titles
• Include full addresses for authors
• Include abstracts and key words
• Include references that are current, from quality journals, and of an appropriate number for the article in a standard format
• Contain usable metadata including: abstracts, titles, and keywords
• Demonstrate diversity of reviewers and authors
• Include all or mostly all original articles
• Contain articles that are substantiated with empirical data or other means
• Be published on a regular schedule appropriate for the established frequency of the journal
• Have articles that are written by professionals in their field.

In addition, e-journals must:

• Provide evidence of archiving arrangements, online or otherwise
• Include a posting date for articles and revisions
• Have published at least three issues

Features that support acceptance:

• Sponsorship by a astronomy or physics association or other society
• Astronomers or physicists among editorial board members and authors
• Indexed in other scholarly databases
• Online access
• English table of contents
• Transliterated references
• Frequency of publication clearly advertised on masthead or web page

For e-journals

• Presence of version number
• Indication of where previous versions can be obtained Links

Relevance: An article that includes any of the following may be relevant:

• the scientific study of astronomy
• content in any of the subfields of astronomy or physics
• non-astronomy content of interest to astronomers in different subfields
• content in related fields that has astronomical relevance

If you have a journal to be evaluated, please feel free to send email to us at adshelp@cfa.harvard.edu.