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 and matching the title at the ISSN Portal; a live HTTPS site; an editorial board with names and affiliations; editor-in-chief named; postal contact and publisher identified on the site. |
| Editorial integrity | 25 | Published peer-review policy; publication-ethics / malpractice statement; plagiarism screening declared; retraction and correction policy. Points are lost for predatory signals: invented impact factors, "publication within 48 hours", unverifiable index claims, an editor list with no affiliations. |
| Technical standing | 20 | Crossref membership and DOIs actually registered; metadata completeness (abstracts, licences, ORCIDs, references, funders); whether the registered DOIs still resolve to a live page; whether the articles published on the site actually carry a DOI at all; OAI-PMH endpoint; Google Scholar meta tags. |
| Preservation & access | 15 | A preservation arrangement (Keepers Registry, PKP PN, CLOCKSS/LOCKSS, or Internet Archive / Zenodo copies); a stated Creative Commons licence; transparent fees or a clear no-fee statement; open-access status declared. |
| 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, 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.
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. Ratings are recomputed at most weekly, so a fix you make today shows up within seven days (editors can force a re-check 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 · Crossref REST API · DOAJ API · OpenAlex · Keepers Registry · Unpaywall · Retraction Watch hijacked-journal list · the journal's own site and OAI-PMH endpoint. All public, all free, all citable — which is why every line of a rating carries a link you can click.
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.
