Center for Scholarly Indexing and Evaluation
Research on journal indexing criteria, scholarly database design, journal quality evaluation frameworks, citation analysis, and transparency in scholarly infrastructure.
About the Center
The Center for Scholarly Indexing and Evaluation is the home of Panorama Research Institute's research on the systems and frameworks used to index, evaluate, and rank academic journals and publications. The Center conducts original research on indexing criteria, database design, citation metrics, and the governance of scholarly evaluation systems.
The Center is the institutional home of the POSI (Panorama Open Scholarly Indexing) project, which aims to build and maintain a transparent, comprehensive, and methodologically rigorous index of academic journals. POSI is designed to be a resource for researchers, institutions, publishers, and policymakers who need reliable information about journal standards and quality.
Beyond the POSI project, the Center conducts comparative research on existing indexing and ranking systems, assesses the social and epistemic effects of journal evaluation frameworks, and develops policy recommendations for improving the transparency and fairness of scholarly evaluation.
Core Research Areas
Journal Indexing Systems
Research on the design, criteria, and governance of journal indexing systems including Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ESCI, and emerging alternatives.
Citation Metrics
Research on citation-based journal evaluation metrics, including impact factor, CiteScore, h-index, and their limitations and applications.
Journal Quality Frameworks
Research on non-citation-based journal quality assessment, including editorial standards, peer review quality, and publication ethics compliance.
Database Transparency
Research on the governance, ownership, transparency, and methodology disclosure of major scholarly databases and indexing platforms.
Predatory Publishing Detection
Research on identification frameworks, characteristics, and policies for addressing predatory journals and questionable publishers.
Open Scholarly Infrastructure
Research on open, community-governed alternatives to commercial indexing and evaluation, including DOI registration, metadata standards, and linked data.
POSI: Panorama Open Scholarly Indexing
POSI is a long-term scholarly infrastructure project led by the Center for Scholarly Indexing and Evaluation. Its goal is to develop a comprehensive, transparent, and publicly accessible index of academic journals with detailed metadata on editorial practices, indexing status, publication ethics, open access policies, and peer review standards.
Unlike commercial indexing systems, POSI operates on open data principles: its methodology is publicly documented, its data is freely accessible, and its governance is subject to academic oversight. The POSI database is designed to complement existing indexes rather than replace them, providing additional dimensions of journal quality information not captured by citation-based metrics alone.
The POSI database has been developed and is currently awaiting official launch. The current pre-launch work focuses on final data quality checks, methodology documentation, public access workflows, and launch preparation.