Authors are motivated to publish in journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus because their evaluation is based on that. However, one should always check whether a claim about being indexed in one of these databases is true (medical professionals may also consider MEDLINE PubMed).

A journal’s claim about being indexed in WoS or Scopus can be verified either in the database directly or according to the content of both databases available publicly. In the case of WoS, you can use the online search engine Master Journal List. The list of Scopus indexed journals can be downloaded on the website Elsevier in the section Scopus Content (Solutions > Scopus > How Scopus works > Content coverage > Titles on Scopus).

The necessity to carefully check information on journals’ websites is shown on the example of American Journal of Analytical Chemistry, which gives Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) at the first place in the section Indexation. This is complemented with data about citation rates and a link to a preview from WoS documenting this indexation.

This text may give you the impression that the journal is indexed in Web of Science, although this is not the case (see below the preview from WoS). In reality, this preview from WoS only proves that the Journal of Analytical Chemistry was cited by other journals in WoS.