The journal - awareness, recognition and indexing

Professionally produced indexing as well as supporting journals by other bibliographical services is closely related to information linking and discovery, dissemination of knowledge and access. Newly founded open-access scholarly journals are usually not aware of the benefits of these opportunities. Furthermore, one can be puzzled by the dubious indexing enterprises popping up that provide misleading metrics. This paper wishes to contribute to a more conscious information management of journals that takes into consideration bibliographic and indexing facilities. It reviews the development of quality criteria and linking indicators as well as the recent practices in recording quality parameters and quantifying the indexing of humanities and social sciences journals in bibliographic databases. Comparisons are made between several, by Hungarians less known but significant metaindexes that comprise valuable information on academic values. The following secondary reference sources are discussed among others: Latindex, DIALNET, MIAR, DOAJ, ERIH Plus and the Hungarian journal portal maintained by the Database of Hungarian Scientific Works (Magyar Tudomanyos Muvek Tara, MTMT).