The Journal Trust Rating — free to check, evidence on every line Which journals
can be trusted?
Smart Scholars rates any journal A–E from the public record (ISSN Portal, Crossref, DOAJ, OpenAlex, Keepers) in about ten seconds, and links every finding to the registry it came from.
Since UGC-CARE closed, every author, university and funder in India has to judge journals alone — from lists that are out of date the week they are published. And for editors: the same rating becomes the fix list that raises it.
No lists sold. No journal can pay to change its grade. Every grade recomputes itself when the public record changes.
For journal publishers — free, no account What does Crossref hold about your journal?
Every index reads your Crossref record before it reads your journal. Give us one address and we read it back to you in under a minute: your DOIs, and how many carry reference lists, licences, abstracts, affiliations and ORCID iDs. Your own public record, not our opinion.
Smart Scholars is a Crossref service provider. Your DOIs stay in your journal's name, deposited through your own Crossref account.
Five pillars, 100 points
- Identity & governance (25) — ISSN record, live site, named editorial board, publisher
- Editorial integrity (25) — peer review, ethics, plagiarism screening, predatory-style red flags
- Technical standing (20) — Crossref DOIs that resolve, complete metadata, OAI-PMH
- Preservation & access (15) — archiving, licence, fee transparency
- Reach & citation (15) — DOAJ, OpenAlex works and citations
Two or more red flags cap the grade at D. When the registries cannot be read, the journal is marked U — insufficient data, never given a low grade it did not earn.
What does Crossref hold about you?
Every index reads your Crossref record before it reads your journal. Give us one address and we read it back to you in under a minute — your own public record, not our opinion, with a link so you can check every figure yourself.
What it shows
- How many DOIs you have registered, and in which journals
- How many of them carry reference lists, licences, abstracts, author affiliations, ROR IDs, ORCID iDs and full-text links — and how many are missing
- How many DOIs you registered each year, and whether you have gone quiet
- Your ISSN records, linked, so you can see what the registries say about you
Why it matters
DOAJ wants a licence it can read by machine. Scopus and Clarivate judge international spread from author affiliations. Every discovery service in the world reads your reference lists. A record missing those is the first thing an assessor sees — and most publishers have never looked at it.
The figures come from Crossref's own public API about your membership. We change nothing and we need no login of yours.
Start where you stand
The same evidence — public registries, read live — answers four different questions. Pick the one that is yours.
Scholar Shield
"Is this journal safe to publish in?" A free Journal Trust Rating with every check linked to its source, a certificate for your promotion file, and a check of your own published record.
Research Integrity Desk
"Does this journal count, and did this person really publish there?" Batch journal evaluation with a printable committee report, publication verification against Crossref, and a watch-list that warns you when a grade drops.
Portfolio Console
"Which of my sixty journals is quietly broken?" One table for a whole portfolio — rating, DOI health, dead links, preservation, index applications — with a JSON API and bulk import from your existing sheet.
Journals
"What do I fix first?" Your rating, the fix list ordered by the points each item earns back, and the three tools that do the work — Journal Audit, GetIndexed and DOI Doctor.
Nine hundred articles, half of them invisible
What the registries said
- 956 articles on the site, only 489 DOIs known to Crossref — the rest invisible to every indexer
- 186 DOIs pointing at a dead URL after a platform migration
- 459 records with no licence, 286 with no abstract
- No preservation copy anywhere
None of this was visible from the journal's own dashboard. All of it is visible to a DOAJ or Scopus evaluator.
What has been done so far
- Every article on the site matched against every DOI under the prefix — a per-article census the editor can act on
- All 489 PDFs mirrored in the Internet Archive, Wayback and Zenodo
- Registration sheets produced in the sponsor's own six-column format for the missing DOIs
- Repair list for dead links, abstracts, licences and ORCIDs — deposited only after the editor approves
An Indian OJS journal, working with us since 2026. Named on request once the backfile is complete.
Journals and publishers in 21 countries
Each pin is a country where we work with journal owners or publishers. It is our own record, not a registry figure — ask us and we will say who, where the journal allows it.
- Algeria
- Australia
- Bangladesh
- Cambodia
- India
- Indonesia
- Iran
- Israel
- Italy
- Jamaica
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Serbia
- Sri Lanka
- Thailand
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Vietnam
From audit to application — and maintained
Journal Audit
A 121-point check of the journal website against the criteria DOAJ, Scopus and UGC actually use — ISSN, policies, editorial board, licensing, archiving, DOIs — with a fix list an editor can act on.
- First audit: ₹4,999 per journal
- Report with page-by-page evidence
- Re-audit until it passes
GetIndexed
Applications to 153 indexes, registries and libraries prepared from the audit and filed by our agent — Google Scholar, DOAJ, EBSCO, ROR, national registers — plus Digital Archives, Citation Check and Reference Booster.
- An 8-stage ladder, in the right order
- Every submission with proof and follow-up
- Preservation copies of every PDF
DOI Doctor
The maintenance layer: every DOI checked at doi.org and Crossref; dead links, missing abstracts, licences and ORCIDs repaired with your approval; backfile DOIs; a weekly silent-failure monitor; verified metrics; JATS XML.
- Crossref schema 5.5.0 deposits
- Works with your sponsor or your own login
- Public metrics page reviewers can verify
Everything you can put a DOI on
A journal is rarely only its articles. The book your editors published, the proceedings of your conference, the thesis your university awarded, the dataset behind a paper, the review a referee wrote, the grant that paid for it — each of these can carry its own DOI, and each one is a place your work is found and counted. We register all of them.
Journals
- Journal articles
- Journal titles
- Pending publications
- Peer reviews
- Preprints & posted content
Books & conferences
- Books
- Book chapters
- Book series
- Book sets
- Conference proceedings
- Proceedings series
- Conference papers
Other research output
- Theses & dissertations
- Reports & working papers
- Report series
- Standards
- Databases
- Datasets
- Figures, tables & supplements
Funding
- Grants & funding awards
Every record gets a DOI that resolves, metadata written to the standard the indexes read, the people credited with their ORCIDs and their roles, the funder named, and the links between the pieces — a chapter to its book, a review to the paper it reviews, a dataset to the article it belongs to.
See it in DOI Doctor → DOIs for conference proceedings Ask about a record type
Built on public registries, not promises
Verifiable by design
Every number we show — DOIs resolving, citations, preservation status, ISSN record — links to Crossref, OpenAlex, the ISSN Portal, DOAJ or the Keepers Registry. A reviewer can check us in one click, and so can you.
Your credentials, your control
Deposits to Crossref are made with the journal's own login or handed to its sponsor as ready sheets. Nothing is sent until you press Approve. Credentials are encrypted at rest and used only for that journal.
Honest scope
We do not write papers, "remove" plagiarism, sell citations or promise acceptance. We fix the technical reasons journals are rejected, and we say so when a journal is not ready.
Made for OJS journals
Everything reads your OAI-PMH feed and article pages as OJS publishes them. No plugin to install, no host access needed — our agent does the work from outside.
In their own words
This space is for what our clients and authors say — in their own words, approved by us, never written for them. The first review will stand here.
Questions people ask
What is the Journal Trust Rating?
The Journal Trust Rating is a free A–E grade for any journal, worked out from the public record: the ISSN Portal, Crossref, DOAJ, OpenAlex and the Keepers Registry. It scores five pillars out of 100 points, and every finding links to the registry that proves it, so anyone can check it.
How do I check whether a journal can be trusted?
Open Scholar Shield and enter the journal. In about ten seconds you get its grade, with each check linked to its source: the ISSN record, the publisher and editorial board, DOIs that resolve, DOAJ, archiving and the licence. Two or more red flags cap the grade at D.
Can a journal pay to change its grade?
No. No journal can pay to change its grade, and no lists are sold. A grade changes only when the public record changes, such as a new DOAJ listing or DOIs that start to resolve. When the registries cannot be read, the journal is marked U, insufficient data, never given a low grade it did not earn.
What does Smart Scholars do for journals?
Smart Scholars is a Crossref service provider that helps journals meet the technical standards indexes check. It audits the journal's website, registers and repairs DOIs with complete Crossref records, keeps preservation copies of every article and prepares indexing applications, always in the journal's own name. Each index makes its own decision; no listing is promised.
Why does a journal's Crossref record matter?
A Crossref record is the metadata every index and discovery service reads before it reads the journal itself. Reference lists earn citation counts, a licence a machine can read is what DOAJ checks, and author affiliations show international reach. A record missing them is the first gap an assessor sees, and we read yours back free in under a minute.
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