What is the difference between SCI, SCIE and ESCI Journals?

The journal indexing such as SCI, ESCI, and SCIE are received more good reputation across the publishing industries to measure performance and citation metrics of both at the journal and author level.

The journals indexed under this databased are considered to be the world’s leading journals of science and technology, because of a rigorous selection process. The different indexing categories carried out by the journal evaluation companies create more confusion among researchers to choose the right journal for the publication of their scientific manuscripts.

In this article, we are going to find out the difference between SCI, SCIE and ESCI Journals.

What is the Science Citation Index (SCI) or Web of Science(WoS)?

Web of Science(WoS) is an online subscription-based Scientific Citation Indexing(SCI) service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information(ISI) during 1964.

ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992 and named Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property and Science Business, which became known as Thomson ISI, later it maintained by Clarivate Analytics to provides a comprehensive citation search of all indexing.

What is the Science Citation Index Expanded(SCIE)?

The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is the larger version SCI which covers more than 8,500 notable and significant journals, across 150 disciplines, from 1900 to the present.

SCIE is similar to the SCI except for the two differences:

1. Impact factor: SCI has non zero impact factor but SCIE journals are just ranked for impact factor.
2. Storage formate: Both SCI and SCIE are available online. However, SCI is available on CD/DVD format but SCIE is not.

What is the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)?

The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) was launched in late 2015 by Thomson Reuters as a new database in Web of Science.

This index was produced by Clarivate Analytics since 2017, which includes over 3,000 journals from various areas of research.

The journal’s index in this ESCI will not come with an impact factor(IF). However, each journal in this new index will be evaluated every year and those qualified will be transferred to SCIE.

The main aim of the ESCI is to ensure the important research works are visible in the Web of Science Core Collection even if it is not yet internationally recognized.

ESCI journals may have chances to be included in the SCIE when the journal continuously maintains its good quality of the publication.

Basic requirements for indexing in Web of Science (WoS)?

All journals submitted to the core Web of Science databases will be evaluated by the following criteria.

• Whether the journal follows a proper peer review process?
• Whether the journal follows ethical publishing practices?
• Whether the journal meets technical requirements?
• The journal has good English language bibliographic information or not?
• Whether the journal recommended or requested by a scholarly audience of Web of Science users.

If the journal passed the evaluation in a successful way it will be indexed in the ESCI while undergoing more in-depth editorial review.

Hope, this article helps you to know the difference between SCI SCIE and ESCI journals.

Courtesy: Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics

Also Read,

How to Identify ISI, Scopus, or Scimago Indexed journals?

How the Journal Impact Factor(JIF) and H-Index are Calculated?