The Journal Trust Rating
What it measures, how the points are earned, and how an editor raises it — the whole method, published
Five pillars, 100 points
| Pillar | Points | What earns them |
|---|---|---|
| Identity & governance | 25 | ISSN registered at the ISSN Portal, its key-title matching the journal's title; the site live and on HTTPS; an editorial board or editor named on the homepage; the ISSN shown on the homepage; a contact (an e-mail address or a contact page) on the homepage; the publisher named in Crossref, OpenAlex or the journal's record with us. |
| Editorial integrity | 25 | Published peer-review policy; publication-ethics / malpractice statement; plagiarism screening declared — read from the journal's Journal Audit when it has one, else from its homepage. Points are lost for predatory signals on the homepage: impact-factor badges (SJIF, IIFS, Global Impact Factor, ISRA, Cosmos), a self-declared impact factor, an unverifiable "ISI indexed" claim, speed promises such as "publication within 48 hours", and fee-plus-speed marketing. |
| Technical standing | 20 | Crossref membership and DOIs actually registered; metadata completeness of current articles (abstracts, licences, ORCIDs, references); doi.org links on the site; an OAI-PMH link and Google Scholar meta tags; whether the registered DOIs still resolve to a live page and whether the articles published on the site carry a DOI at all (from DOI Doctor's last check and census). |
| Preservation & access | 15 | A preservation arrangement on the ISSN Portal record (the Keepers Registry's archives: CLOCKSS, Portico, LOCKSS, PKP PN and others), or Internet Archive / Zenodo copies made with GetIndexed; a stated Creative Commons licence (on the site, or declared to DOAJ); transparent fees or a clear no-fee statement; open-access status declared (on the site, or in OpenAlex). |
| Reach & citation | 15 | DOAJ listing; works and citations recorded in OpenAlex; h-index; verified listings in other real indexes (from a journal's own GetIndexed acceptances). |
Each check states its status (ok / warn / bad / not checked), the points it earned, the detail behind the verdict and a link to the public source. A check that could not be run — a registry down, a site blocking us — scores nothing but is marked unchecked rather than failed (one exception: when neither the site nor a Journal Audit could be read, the red-flag check keeps its 9 points, because no flag was seen), and if fewer than 40 points' worth of checks could be run at all, the journal is graded U (insufficient data) instead of being given a low grade it did not earn. From 9 Oct 2026, a reading that comes back U never replaces a journal's last complete grade: that grade stays, dated, with the day the reading failed, and the next run tries again. Where a check was decided by reading the homepage or the ISSN Portal record, the rating keeps what was read — the page's SHA-256 fingerprint, the time and the deciding words — and every rating names its methodology version.
Grades
| Grade | Score | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| A | 85–100 | Trusted — maintained to indexer standard |
| B | 70–84 | Sound — minor gaps |
| C | 55–69 | Developing — real gaps an indexer will notice |
| D | 40–54 | Weak — major gaps or warning signs |
| E | below 40 | Not recommended — critical failures or red flags |
| U | — | Insufficient data |
Maintenance cap. A journal cannot be graded A while more than 5% of its registered DOIs fail to resolve, or more than a quarter of the articles on its site have no registered DOI. Those two failures are what an indexer notices first, and no amount of policy pages compensates for them — such a journal is capped at B with the reason shown in its checks.
Red-flag cap. Two or more predatory-style red flags cap the grade at D no matter how many points were scored elsewhere — a journal with excellent metadata and a fake impact factor on its homepage is not a B journal.
What the rating is not
It is not an impact factor and says nothing about the quality of any individual paper. It is not a whitelist or a blacklist: no journal is ever added to or removed from a list by hand, and no journal can pay to change its grade — the only way a grade moves is for the public record to change. It is not a substitute for reading the journal. A rating is made again whenever it is more than seven days old and someone opens it, and every watched journal is re-rated at least every seven days — so a fix you make today shows up within a week; editors can re-check at once from My journals.
Corrections
If a check is wrong — a policy page we could not read, an ISSN mismatch, an archive arrangement we missed — write to mou@smartscholars.in with the ISSN and the URL of the evidence. We re-run the check, and if our reading was wrong we fix the engine, not just your record: the same error was affecting every journal like yours. Corrections are free and we do not ask for anything in return.
Grades issued so far
Every journal anyone has ever checked, not a sample. Most journals that reach us are C or D — that is the point: they are fixable.
Sources we read
ISSN Portal (with the Keepers Registry's archive records it carries) · Crossref REST API · DOAJ API · OpenAlex · the journal's own homepage. All public, all free, all citable — which is why every line of a rating carries a link you can click. Where a journal uses our tools, the rating also reads their results: its Journal Audit, DOI Doctor's census, DOI check and monitor, and GetIndexed's verified index listings and archive copies; those links open only for the journal's owner, and the rating says so beside them. (The Risk Radar, a separate score, also reads Retraction Watch's hijacked-journal checker.)
Who uses it
Authors check a journal before submitting (Scholar Shield). Institutions evaluate journals for promotion and PhD files (Research Integrity Desk). Sponsors and hosts watch a whole portfolio (Portfolio Console). Editors use it as a to-do list — that is this door.
