Guide · Academic
Academic
Collects terms you keep meeting in scholarly publishing — from Web of Science to quartiles, ORCID to predatory journals — grouped by topic. Each entry has a short definition and a longer explanation.
Indexes and databases
What WoS, Scopus, JCR, TR Dizin and related platforms actually do.
- A&HCI Arts & Humanities Citation Index — arts and humanities; classic IF culture differs.
- ESCI Emerging Sources Citation Index — WoS tier for emerging journals.
- JCR Journal Citation Reports — Clarivate’s annual journal impact and quartile product.
- SCIE Science Citation Index Expanded — WoS league for science, engineering, and medicine.
- Scopus Elsevier’s large abstract and citation database; source for CiteScore, SJR, and SNIP.
- SSCI Social Sciences Citation Index — WoS top tier for the social sciences.
- TR Dizin TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM’s national academic database—central in many Turkish appointment rules.
- Web of Science Clarivate’s selective citation index, spanning SCIE, SSCI, A&HCI, and ESCI.
Journal and article impact metrics
Impact Factor, quartile, SJR, SNIP, FWCI, and citation concepts.
- Altmetrics Non-citation societal/digital attention: social media, news, policy, Wikipedia, and more.
- Citable item Documents in the JIF denominator—usually articles and reviews that can receive citations.
- Citation A reference to one work inside another; the basic unit behind most impact metrics.
- CiteScore Scopus/Elsevier journal metric using a four-year window and a wide document set.
- FWCI Field-Weighted Citation Impact — article performance versus field-and-year world average.
- Impact Factor (JIF) Classic Clarivate JCR metric: citations in a year to citable items from the prior two years.
- Quartile (Q1–Q4) Splitting journals in a subject category into four ranks; Q1 is the top 25%.
- SJR SCImago Journal Rank — Scopus-based journal metric that weights citation sources.
- SNIP Source Normalized Impact per Paper — Scopus metric that normalizes field citation differences.
Publishing processes and ecosystem
Peer review, indexing, DOI, ISSN, preprints, open access, predatory journals.
- DOI Digital Object Identifier — a persistent unique ID and link for a digital scholarly object.
- Indexing The process of a journal being accepted and covered by databases such as WoS, Scopus, or TR Dizin.
- ISSN International Standard Serial Number — 8-digit journal ID; print and e-ISSN may differ.
- Open access Free-to-read models—especially Gold (APC, immediate) and Green (repository archiving).
- Peer review Independent experts check quality, methods, and originality before publication.
- Predatory journals Unethical journal practices that chase APCs instead of serious peer review.
- Preprint A manuscript posted to an open archive (arXiv, SSRN, etc.) before peer-reviewed acceptance.