Cabells is a service for evaluating scientific journals. The service comprises Cabells Journalytics (formerly Cabells Journal Whitelist) and Cabells Predatory list (formerly Journal Blacklist). Journalytics allows the users to search for journals and filter them based on the field of science, publisher, ISSN code (International Standard Serial Number), open access and various indicators. The Predatory list is more limited and the users can carry out searches with a search word, publisher, open access and ISSN code.
Journalytics is an independent, curated database for scientific journals with more than 13,000 journals from 18 different fields of science (2022). The database includes the contact and publishing information on the journal as well as indicators reflecting the peer review process (such as time to review and number of reviewers, Figure 1). Journalytics also includes the following quality indicators:
- Cabell's Classification Index© (CCI) is a normalised citation metric that measures how a journal ranks compared with others in each discipline and topic where it publishes. The index helps users select a suitable publication channel, for example.
- Difficulty of Acceptance© (DA) shows how difficult it is to publish in different fields of science. Each topic in the journal has its own percentile score based on citation data. The number of publications by top research units published in the journal affects the DA© value.
- Altmetric Report is an indicator that monitors mentions received by articles, based on the Altmetric service. It helps users assess how much media attention an article published in the journal could potentially receive.
Figure 1. Indicators related to an article submission and its peer review process. © Cabells Scholarly Analytics 11 May 2022.
Predatory Reports is a database about deceptive and predatory journals. Its purpose is to help users evaluate scientific journals, for example when selecting a publication channel. The background of the evaluation, carried out by experts, is a three-tier set of criteria that is based on the severity of violations. Each observed violation will be graded based on its severity. The report lists the violations revealed during the evaluation. Journals can request a new evaluation, however.