What POSI Is Not
Knowing what POSI does not do is as important as knowing what it does. These are explicit, documented limitations, not disclaimers.
Conflict of Interest: POSI is operated by Panorama Scholarly Group Ltd. (PSG), which also publishes the majority of journals currently evaluated on this platform. See the full COI Disclosure for details.
Licensed from or affiliated with Web of Science or Scopus
WoS and Scopus are commercial, proprietary citation databases. POSI does not license their data, reproduce their metrics, or claim equivalence — PCI, PCS, and POSI's subject rankings are POSI's own openly-defined, reproducible metrics, computed from open data (OpenAlex, Crossref), not a free substitute for Journal Impact Factor or CiteScore.
An accreditation authority
A POSI record — Discovered, Indexed, or Metric Eligible — is not a certification. It does not constitute DOAJ listing, COPE membership, peer-review verification, or any other external accreditation.
A seller of rankings or guaranteed inclusion
Admission, scores, rankings, and quartiles are computed by open, versioned methodology and code. No payment, sponsorship, or relationship with POSI or Panorama Scholarly Group changes a journal's evidence, score, or rank.
A peer review certifier or article validator
POSI does not assess the scientific quality of individual articles, verify reviewer credentials, or certify that peer review occurred for any given article. Automated evidence checks assess the existence of publicly stated policies and structural signals in published output, not scientific correctness.
A substitute for evaluating individual researchers, hiring, or funding decisions
PQF, PCI/PCS, and Early-Stage Rating are journal-level and infrastructure-level metrics. None of them are designed or validated for assessing an individual researcher's output, and POSI explicitly asks users not to use them that way — see Responsible Use.
POSI vs. Other Services
| Service | POSI Relationship |
|---|---|
| Web of Science | No overlap. POSI does not compute Impact Factors. |
| Scopus | No overlap. POSI is not a citation index. |
| DOAJ | External metadata only. DOAJ listing status contributes zero weight to POSI admission, scores, rankings, or quartiles. |
| Crossref | Data source. POSI queries Crossref for DOI and article metadata. |
How to Use POSI Appropriately
- -Do not use PQF scores as the sole basis for journal selection, hiring decisions, or research evaluation.
- -Always verify journal credentials against DOAJ, Scopus, or Web of Science for publication decisions.
- -Treat PQF scores for PSG-published journals with awareness of the structural conflict of interest.
- -Use POSI alongside, not instead of, established indexing and accreditation services.