Indexing and Discoverability

01

Journal identifiers

An identifier names the journal so that a record anywhere can point at it unambiguously.

The journal is registered with an International Standard Serial Number, which is the identifier catalogs, libraries and citation systems use to distinguish it from every other title.

An ISSN registration identifies the journal; each service below has its own, separate role.

02

DOI registration

A DOI is a permanent handle for one article, so a citation keeps resolving when a URL changes.

The journal registers article Digital Object Identifiers with Crossref, under the publisher prefix 10.14302, and deposits each registered article’s metadata — title, authors, affiliations, publication date, license and references — with it. Crossref then makes that metadata available to the many services that read from it.

DOI registration is a metadata service: it gives a registered article a persistent identifier and makes its metadata available, while selective indexes apply their own criteria, described in section 05.

03

Metadata harvesting

Harvesting lets any repository or aggregator collect the journal's records automatically.

The publisher exposes an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting endpoint, so aggregators, institutional repositories and discovery systems can collect the journal’s article records in Dublin Core without a bilateral arrangement.

Articles also carry an ORCID iD for every author who supplies one, and the editorial board records ORCID iDs where members have them, so a person can be followed across the literature rather than matched by name.

Harvesting and author identifiers make the journal’s records available and resolvable to every service that reads them.

04

Discovery services

A discovery service builds a searchable index from openly available metadata.

OpenAlex, the open scholarly catalog, holds a source record for this journal and links its articles from the Crossref deposits.

A discovery service builds its index from metadata that is already open. Appearing in one reflects the availability of the journal’s records, and each service applies its own coverage rules.

05

Selective journal-level indexing

A selective index evaluates a journal against published criteria before covering it.

Databases of this kind — the ones that assess a title and then decide whether to cover it — publish their own criteria and run their own review cycles. This page names a selective index only where the journal’s inclusion has been confirmed, together with the date the confirmation was checked.

Authors who need to know the journal’s status with a particular database for a funder, a promotion committee or an institutional list are welcome to write to [email protected], and the editorial office will answer directly.

06

Digital preservation

Preservation keeps the published record readable if the publisher's own systems one day stop.

This journal’s content is committed to Portico, a not-for-profit digital-preservation archive run by ITHAKA (the organization behind JSTOR). As articles are deposited they enter Portico’s permanent archive, so the scholarly record stays available for the long term — even if a title one day ceases to publish.

Read our preservation policy.

Authors with NIH funding have a separate route into PubMed Central. Eligible NIH-funded manuscripts may be deposited individually in PubMed Central through the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS).

An individual deposit of that kind places one manuscript in PubMed Central through a funder route available to the author; journal-level coverage in PubMed Central or MEDLINE is a separate, selective arrangement.