Journals and VATAT*
What journals are included in the VATAT's budgeting model?
How can we tell the difference between respected journals and predatory journals?
* Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israeli Council for Higher Education
Answer
The budgeting model of the higher education system in Israel, as determined by the Council for Higher Education's (CHE) Planning and Budgeting Committee (VATAT), consists of a teaching component and a research component and a measure of the scientific impact of research articles based on the Impact Factor of journals in which articles appear.
The publications component is based on journals included in the following databases (updated August 2019, for 2017 publications in the model):
- Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) for medical science, nature and technology
- Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
- PsycINFO for psychology
- Education Source for education (journals list)
- ERIC for education
- Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for social sciences
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) for humanities and arts
- Hebrew and Arabic Publications : Active journals appearing in Haifa's index
For journals to avoid, one information source is Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers. Additional reading:
- 2019 New York Times article about "questionable scientific journals"
- 2018 University Affairs article about poor-quality, predatory conferences
- 2017 BMC article about predatory vs legitimate biomedical journals
- 2016 Huffington Post blog post about Predatory Open Access Journals - note that the link to Beall's list is wrong (didn't test all the links)
In addition to the VATAT, respected sources of information about legitimate OA journals can be found at
- DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
- OASPA (Open Access Scholary Publishers Association)
- Cabell's Scholarly Analytics
- Well-known databases like Scopus and Web of Science