Svenska Listan – a register of peer-reviewed publication channels in SwePub

Svenska Listan is based on the publication channels that researchers use, and that the HEIs register in SwePub. SwePub also includes publications that fulfil purposes other than academic reporting of scientific work, such as report series, yearbooks and articles in daily newspapers. Svenska Listan helps to easily separate publication channels that are peer-reviewed from those that fulfil other purposes. For the Swedish Research Council and others who wish to monitor and evaluate Swedish research, it offers increased opportunities for making fair bibliometric analyses, in particular in humanities and social sciences.

Svenska Listan has not been developed as a means for allocating research funding. For this reason, the list includes no grading or ranking of the publication channels. Nor is the list intended to direct which publication channels researchers in Sweden should use when publishing. It shows, quite simply, whether the channels listed in SwePub are peer-reviewed or not.

Svenska listan är inte framtagen som ett underlag för att fördela forskningsmedel. Därför finns det ingen poängsättning eller rankning av publikationskanalerna i listan. Tanken är inte heller att den Svenska listan ska vara styrande för i vilka publikationskanaler forskare i Sverige ska publicera sig. Listan visar helt enkelt om kanalerna som förekommer i Swepub är sakkunniggranskade eller inte.

Svenska Listan is updated once a year with new classifications of publication channels. The purpose of the update is to regularly include new publications registered by researchers in SwePub in the list, and to expand the channel classification for the future and to cover channels that have not previously been included in the list. There are approximately 50 000 registered publication channels in SwePub. To make the assessment more efficient, Svenska Listan is produced in two steps.

Step 1: Classification based on Nordic authority registers, Web of Science and DOAJ

In the first step, we compare the publication channels in SwePub with authority registers in Denmark, Finland and Norway, and with the Web of Science (WoS), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and metadata in SwePub.

The authority registers kept by Norway, Denmark and Finland are used to evaluate the impact of research and to allocate research funding. These countries invest great resources in scrutinising publication channels. The scrutiny processes are thorough, and the evaluations are done with great care and quality. For this reason, the authority registers can be used as the basis for classifying publication channels in Svenska Listan. The authority registers held in Norway, Denmark and Finland show which publication channels are included among scientific ones, and also divide these up into different scientific levels. As Svenska Listan only has two levels – peer-reviewed and not peer-reviewed – we convert the level divisions used in the other Nordic lists into binary gradings; that is, either “peer-reviewed” or “not peer-reviewed”. The Nordic authority registers are unified, based on the publication channels’ ISSN, and a majority rule is used to combine the Nordic grades into a Swedish classification.

The majority rule states that if a majority of the countries assessing the channel agree on the grade, then this grade will be used in Svenska Listan. In cases where only two countries have assessed a channel and disagree on the assessment, then the channel cannot be classified based on the majority rule.

All publication channels with a valid ISSN in SwePub are classified based on the majority rule into one of the categories “peer-reviewed” or “not peer-reviewed”. The channels that lack a Nordic majority decision, or are not included in any of the Nordic authority lists are checked against WoS or DOAJ. If such a channel is included in WoS or DOAJ, it is classified as “peer-reviewed”.

Channels that lack a Nordic majority decision and is not included in either WoS or DOAJ are then classified manually.

Step 2: Manual classification of publication channels

Following the classification in Step 1, a few publication channels remain that lack classification. For these, manual classification is necessary. To make this work manageable, we prioritise the channels with the most publications in SwePub. This year’s manual classification included the channels that could not be classified automatically and had at least 35 publications in SwePub during 2012–2020. In total, this was 160 channels, of which 100 were in humanities and social sciences, 46 in natural and engineering sciences, and 14 in medicine and health. A channel’s manual classification is reviewed every third year. This year’s manual classifications are valid for 2020 and the next following three years.

To be approved as a peer-reviewed publication channel, the following criteria must be fulfilled:

1. The channel specialises in publishing scientific research results.
2. The publication channel has an editorial committee consisting of subject experts.
3. The publication channel has procedures for peer review that mean the publication is assessed by at least one external reviewer with a doctoral degree and specialist knowledge in the scientific field.
4. The publication channel has a registered ISSN.
5. E-publications archive their publications (do not consist of blogs or similar).

The publication channel is assessed as not peer-reviewed if:

1. The scientific level or relevance is doubtful. This includes channels such as those that publish open access articles against payment, without a proper quality assessment (known as ‘rogue publishers’/‘rogue journals’).
2. If more than half of the reviewers and authors belong to the same research organisation. An exception are pure doctoral thesis series, which are assessed as peer-reviewed.

Information about the criteria is obtained primarily via available information on the internet. Where it is not possible to find information to determine the classification, the publication channel is contacted via its publisher, chief editor or other contact person.

This year’s update of Svenska Listan is part of SwePub as from Version 1.6, which went into production by the National Library of Sweden on 19 May 2022.

The latest update is based on a data download from SwePub in Mars 2022. It adds channel classifications for year 2021. This year’s manual classification included the channels that could not be classified automatically and had at least 35 publications in SwePub during 2012–2021. In total, this was 42 channels, of which 22 were in humanities and social sciences, 9 in natural and engineering sciences, 7 in agricultural science and veterinary medicine, 3 in educational Sciences and 1 in medicine and health. This year’s manual classifications are valid for 2021 and the next following three years.

No division into levels

There is no division into levels of the peer-reviewed publication channels in Svenska Listan. The channels are classified in a binary way, as either peer-reviewed or not peer-reviewed. This differs from the authority registers of publication channels that exist in the other Nordic countries.

Classification is by year

Each classification in Svenska Listan is year-specific. When the list is used for analysis, the classification from the year a publication was published shall be used. For example, an article published in 2016 shall be linked to the channel’s classification for 2016, and not that of another year. A channel can only have a classification in the list for the years it had publications registered in SwePub. For this reason, a channel may lack classification for certain years.

ISSN in Svenska Listan

ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is an international system for identifying serial resources. An ISSN is linked to the title of the serial resource. A specific title may only have one ISSN, and if the title changes, the resource shall have another ISSN. A resource that changes from being printed to being published electronically shall also have a new ISSN for the electronic edition. In SwePub, the ISSN shall always be stated when there it one linked to the resource, but there are also serial resources in SwePub that do not have an ISSN.

Svenska Listan today only includes the publication channels in SwePub that have a valid ISSN. This means that only serial resources are included in the list: periodicals, newspapers, conference contributions, annual reports, monograph series, etc. Monograph publications such as books are currently not included. In the longer term, Svenska Listan should also cover scientific monographs. Serial resources that lack ISSN or have an incorrect ISSN are filtered out from the list, as ISSN is used to link together the publication channels in Svenska Listan with the external resources used to classify the channels. It is common for a publication channel to have both a printed and an electronic edition. The two editions have different ISSNs, and are therefore defined in Svenska Listan as different channels. The channels have separate classifications in the list, and the classifications may differ.

Publication channels in Svenska Listan

Serial resources in SwePub with a valid ISSN.

Peer-reviewed publication channel

The channel is specialised in publishing scientific research results, and has a system of independent peer review of the scientific or artistic quality.

Not peer-reviewed publiceringskanal

The channels does not fulfil the above criteria.

Links to authority registers in Nordic countries

Links to further information and download pages for Norwegian, Finnish and Danish authority registers:

• Norwegian registers of scientific publication channels External link, opens in new window.: (Requires a user account that can easily be created)
  
  
• Finnish publication forum’s JUFO list External link, opens in new window.:
  
  
• Danish BFI list External link.:(data is used up to and including the 2021 classification, the list was discontinued in December 2021).