Our method
Scienda ranks journals by quality and filters PubMed by topic. This page explains how, openly enough that you can judge the ranking — and cite it. The exact parameters of the calculation are deliberately not published; the sources and the principles are.
Where the numbers come from
The quality measure is built from open bibliographic data — no proprietary, licence-bound index sits between you and the ranking:
- OpenAlex — an open catalogue of scholarly works, released under a CC0 public-domain dedication. It supplies the citation signal behind the measure.
- The NLM Catalog (U.S. National Library of Medicine) — supplies each journal's discipline, so that a journal is compared with the right peers.
We do not use, display or resell the SJR, the Journal Impact Factor, or any subscription ranking. The measure below is our own, computed from the open sources named here.
How a journal is ranked
In plain terms: we measure how often a journal's articles land among the most-cited of their own field, over a multi-year window, with a correction that stops a small or brand-new journal from being flattered — or punished — by chance.
The rank you see is a percentile within a discipline, never across all of science: “Top 5% in cardiology” is not “Top 5% in oncology”, and a cardiology journal is judged against cardiology journals, not against Nature. That is the whole point — it makes the badge mean the same thing to a specialist as to a generalist.
- Elite is a short list of major general journals (NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, Nature…), kept apart from the percentile scale.
- Unranked means not measured — a journal too new or too small to rank fairly — not “poor”. We never show it as a zero: a figure we cannot measure is not displayed.
We do not publish the exact formula, the smoothing, or the thresholds behind these bands. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight: a ranking that can be gamed is a ranking you cannot trust. The method is fixed, applied identically to every journal, and dated below.
When it was computed, and what it covers
- Last computed on 2026-09-04, and refreshed about once a year.
- Citation window: 2019–2022.
- 17,406 of 37,578 journals in the catalogue carry a score; the rest are shown as Unranked, never as a zero.
How articles reach you
Every day Scienda scans PubMed across 24 specialties, keeps what matches the topics you follow and your quality floor, removes duplicates, and sends a single email — title, journal, date, article type, quality badge and a link to PubMed. It selects and routes; it never hosts the article, and the email carries no abstract or full text.
A relevance model may flag an article it suspects is off-topic for its category — it moves it to the end, it never deletes it. The settings themselves are described on the Help page.
Spotted an error?
If a journal looks misclassified — the wrong discipline, a missing title, a band that seems off — please tell us at [email protected]. Every report gets an answer, and a confirmed error is corrected at the latest when the ranking is next recomputed.
What this is not
- A ranking is about journals, not individual articles: it says nothing about the validity of any single paper or its conclusions.
- It is not medical advice and no substitute for clinical judgement, peer review, or reading the work itself.
- Journal rankings are factual and method-based, computed the same way for every title. Like any method that ranks journals, though, ours carries bias and is not a definitive judgement on a journal's quality or relevance. They are neither an endorsement nor a criticism of any journal or publisher.
What the service does and does not do is set out in the Terms of Service, which prevail over this page.