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Panorama Open Scholarly Index

Responsible use

POSI follows the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto: journal-level indicators describe journals, and should not stand in for judgements about individual articles or researchers.

Appropriate uses

  • Finding and identifying journals, and checking their ISSNs, publisher, open access status and registry records.
  • Comparing journals within a subject category by citation performance, using the PNCI category rank, percentile, Citation Quartile and POSI Zone.
  • Confirming that a journal is indexed, or certified for the Core Collection.
  • Documenting that a publication appears in an indexed journal, with a certificate of indexing.
  • Research on scholarly publishing, using the data under CC BY 4.0.

Uses to avoid

  • Judging an individual article or researcher by the rank of the journal it appeared in.
  • Using POSI rankings as the only basis for hiring, promotion, tenure or funding decisions.
  • Comparing Citation Quartiles, zones or raw citation scores across subject categories, which differ in citation practice.
  • Treating POSI Citation Quartiles (C-Q1 to C-Q4) as equivalent to quartiles published by other services.
  • Reading a PQF score as a ranking, or an AJR Rating (A+ to D) as a quartile.
  • Treating indexing as an endorsement of every article a journal publishes.

Known limitations

  • Citation counts come from Crossref and depend on what publishers deposit, so coverage varies between publishers and fields.
  • Subject classification is computed from OpenAlex topics. Journals without a clear subject are not ranked by category.
  • New or small journals may have unstable citation estimates. POSI applies minimum sample, coverage and category-size requirements, and marks rankings that do not meet them in full as provisional.
  • PNCI reduces but cannot eliminate disciplinary and database-coverage differences; citation indicators measure citation performance, not every dimension of scholarly quality.
  • Panorama Scholarly Group publishes both POSI and some of the journals it covers. See the conflict of interest disclosure.

How each figure is produced is set out in the methodology.

Citing POSI

Panorama Open Scholarly Index (POSI). Panorama Scholarly Group Ltd. https://posi.panorama-sg.com. Accessed [date].

When reusing data, please also credit the original sources shown on each record, such as Crossref and OpenAlex. Licensing is described under data sources and access.