Trust in science is under more pressure than it has been in a long time. Paper mills, hijacked journals, citation rings and a flood of machine-written manuscripts mean that “is this a real journal?” is now a question every reader, reviewer, funder and university has to ask. And the tools for answering it have not kept up.
The traditional answer is a deny list. Something like the old Beall’s List: a roster of predatory journals, so you can filter them out of a search, an evaluation, a systematic review. We understand the appeal. Nobody wants to cite a paper mill by accident.
But we’re not building a deny list, and we don’t think you want one either. Librarians have been making this case for a decade: deny lists are opaque, they go stale the moment they’re published, they’re a lawsuit magnet, and they land hardest on exactly the journals that can least absorb the hit… small, new, non-English, Global South. Beall’s List went dark in 2017. The advice since then has been consistent: don’t filter out the bad, filter in the good. Use allow lists.
So that’s what we’ve done. Every source in OpenAlex now has a listed_in field: the external journal lists that source appears on. If you want to keep predatory journals out of a query, you filter in journals that somebody you trust has vetted:
https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=primary_location.source.listed_in:doaj
Same thing on the website: works whose journal is in DOAJ.
Lots of lists, not one list
In the era of the legacy indexes, “approved” meant one thing: is it in the index? That made a kind of sense when a couple of companies ran the only lists. It makes less sense now, because different questions need different lists.
We launched in September with twenty-two, and we keep adding more: there are 61 now. The first twenty-two:
| List | Who maintains it | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
doaj | DOAJ | vetted fully-OA journals, all fields (~23,000 sources) |
cwts-core | CWTS, Leiden | the venues behind the Leiden Ranking Open Edition (~36,000) |
medline | NLM | journals currently indexed for MEDLINE (~5,200) |
doyens | Conférence des Doyens de Médecine + CNU Santé | French deans’ list of health-science journals (~3,300) |
ki-jl-1, ki-jl-2, ki-jl-3 | Karolinska Institutet | KI’s own journal list, levels 1 to 3, medicine and health (~5,100 / ~650 / ~140) |
erih-plus | HK-dir | European humanities and social sciences (~11,800) |
norway-1, norway-2 | Norwegian Register | levels 1 and 2, all fields; also used by Sweden (~22,700 / ~2,200) |
jufo-1, jufo-2, jufo-3 | Publication Forum, Finland | levels 1 to 3, all fields (~19,500 / ~2,600 / ~1,400) |
abdc-a-star, abdc-a, abdc-b, abdc-c | Australian Business Deans Council | Journal Quality List, A* to C, business and economics (~220 / ~610 / ~820 / ~770) |
latindex | Latindex | Catálogo 2.0: Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (~4,000) |
scielo | SciELO | current journals in the SciELO network collections (~1,500) |
jpps-1, jpps-2, jpps-3 | AJOL + INASP | Journal Publishing Practices and Standards, one to three stars (~330 / ~380 / 3) |
Since then we’ve added national research-evaluation lists from Russia (the White List), Poland, Flanders (VABB-SHW), Italy (ANVUR), Türkiye (TR Dizin), South Africa (DHET), Korea (KCI), Spain (the FECYT quality seal), Argentina (Núcleo Básico) and Colombia (Publindex); the FT50, UTD24 and FNEGE business-school lists; the China Computer Federation’s journal list (CCF); and China’s Dongbi Index.
A journal can be on several. The Lancet is on twelve of them. A French med-school dean’s office wants the Doyens list; a Nordic university doing research assessment wants the Norwegian Register or JUFO; a business school wants ABDC; someone mapping Latin American scholarship wants Latindex and SciELO. Pick the list that matches the question, or combine them.
The newest kind of list on the table is a single university’s. Karolinska Institutet published its journal list this year, graded by its own faculty, to drive how it allocates research funding. It didn’t wait for a legacy index to tell it which journals count. We expect more of these.
One thing we’re careful about: listed_in is not us saying a journal is good. It’s us saying a journal is on a list, and telling you who maintains that list and where to find it. Every list gets its own page (here’s Latindex) with the maintainer, the URL, and the edition we loaded. We reload when the maintainer publishes a new edition. Judgment stays with the people who made the list. We just make it queryable.
The lists from the Global South
This is the part we’re proudest of.
Journals from the Global South have spent decades getting left out of the legacy indexes. So they built their own. Latindex has been cataloguing Ibero-American journals since 1997. SciELO built an entire open-access publishing network. AJOL and INASP wrote JPPS, an assessment framework, and applied it to about 1,600 journals across Africa, Nepal, Bangladesh, Central America, Mongolia and Sri Lanka.
The hard part was never making those lists. The hard part is getting them seen: built into the infrastructure that everyone else’s tools run on, so that “is it on a recognized list” can be answered yes for a Nigerian medical journal as easily as for a Dutch one. That’s what listed_in does.
Not in or out
The other thing we love about several of these lists: they aren’t binary.
The Norwegian Register has two levels. JUFO has three. JPPS gives journals one, two or three stars. So instead of loading each as one list, we loaded each level as its own list: norway-2, jufo-3, jpps-1. Filter on one level, or OR them together to get “any level.”
That matters, because the alternative is what the legacy indexes do: you’re in, or you’re invisible. And the journals stuck just outside the line, disproportionately from the Global South, have hated that for good reason. A leveled list can say something more honest: here’s where you are. Not perfect yet; also not nothing. JPPS is especially good at this, because it’s built as a ladder. A journal that gets one star knows exactly what it needs to do for two.
Not every scale runs the same way. The ABDC list grades from A* at the top down to C; we kept their labels rather than renumbering them, because the maintainer’s own scale is the one their community reads.
We think that’s the right way to see scholarly communication. Binary made sense when collections were physical: a journal was on the shelf or it wasn’t, and there was no practical way for something to be halfway. That constraint is gone. We can see the world as it is now, in shades of gray, and our data should too.
Try it
- On the website: the listed in filter on sources, source listed in on works, and a page for every list.
- In the API:
sources?filter=listed_in:jufo-3,works?filter=primary_location.source.listed_in:medline,works?group_by=primary_location.source.listed_in, and thesource-listsentity atapi.openalex.org/source-lists. - Docs: help.openalex.org/data/source-lists.
A call to the community
Sixty-one lists is a start, not an end, and the next ones should come from you.
If your discipline, your country or your consortium decides on a list of journals it trusts and commits to maintaining it, we’ll integrate it, so that it’s available for analysis in OpenAlex alongside everything else. The list stays yours. We make it usable. Know an open, ISSN-keyed list we should add, or maintain one and want it in? Tell us.
And once the lists are in, the questions get interesting. How does a systematic review change when you run it against DOAJ, against MEDLINE, against JUFO level 3? How much of what we call the state of knowledge in a field depends on which list drew the boundary? What does the research ecosystem look like when the journals of Latin America, Africa and South Asia are indexed and discoverable on the same footing as everyone else’s? Those used to be hard questions to even set up. Now they’re a filter.







