Understand the classification of ISI, ESCI, and SCOPUS journals

Journals under the ISI category

ISI stands for Institute of Scientific Information, USA. ISI journals are a system of journals included in their database by the ISI Institute, and are considered the standard for determining the scientific quality of journals.

Initially, ISI only includes the SCI (Science Citation Index) collection, which focuses on the fields of Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology with the highest quality and longest tradition in the world. Later, SCI was expanded into SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded), including journals of Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Society, Humanities and Arts published from 1900 to the present. Currently, ISI is more specifically classified, including SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) and A&HCI (Arts & Humanities Citation Index).

Currently the ISI includes category SCIE, SSCI, A&HCI with a total of about 12,000 scientific journals recognized for their quality by the scientific research community.

To know whether a journal belongs to the ISI list or not, scientists just need to access the ISI database and search by journal name, or by International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) 

• Step 1: Access the Master Journal List https://mjl.clarivate.com/search-results

• Step 2: Type the name of the scientific journal, or ISSN number

The image above illustrates searching for the journal “Journal of applied Probability”. Information shows that this is a magazine of Cambridge publishing house and is in the SCIE directory.

ESCI directory:

ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index) is a base of emerging journals, newly put into operation since 2015, currently under the management of Clarivate company; Before that, ESCI belonged to Thomson Reuter company.

Journals belonging to the ESCI portfolio are not on ISI's Core collection but are journals that are registered to be on the core list. Currently, ESCI has more than 8,200 journals. To know if a journal is on the ESCI list, researchers can also perform a search from the ISI list.

Scopus directory:

The Scopus list has been built since 2004, under the management of publisher Elsevier. As of the end of 2022 there are about 44,000 magazines on this list. Different from ISI's classification by SCI, SCIE, SSCI, A&HCI, ESCI, Scopus's ranking criteria are based on Quantiles (abbreviated as Q). A journal with a higher Q has a higher reputation than a journal with a low Q. For example, in the same field of Economics, Econometrics & Finance, journal A with Q = 90% is considered more prestigious than journal B with Q = 80%.

It can be seen that all journals in the ISI category are in the SCOPUS category, some ESCI journals are also in the SCOPUS category. Some SCOPUS journals in the field of economics and finance: Quarterly Journal of Economics; Journal of Management; Resources, Conservation and Recycling; American Economic Journal: Applied Economics…

To know whether a journal is on the SCOPUS list or not, researchers visit the SCOPUS website: https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri

Author: La Minh Hieu – Actuarial Science Laboratory.