Polish lists of scientific journals – a summary of experiences to date from the perspective of law journals

Abstract

The first part of the article discusses the rules regulating the creation of the official list of scientific journals in Poland. The author concludes that these rules have many flaws. Among the de lege ferenda conclusions, the author mentions: (i) the list cannot be applied retroactively, it should only have effects for the future; (ii) decisions concerning inclusion on the list and awarding points should be justified, and these justifications should be publicly available; (iii) decisions concerning inclusion on the list of scientific journals and the awarding of points to scientific journals should be subject to judicial control; (iv) the list of scientific journals should not be prepared by the ministry, but by an independent scientific agency; (v) the list should be fully developed on the basis of a unified, transparent methodology, in which the essential element of the evaluation is the analysis of journal citations. The second part of the article discusses the scientific databases used to create rankings of scientific journals. The author points out that in relation to European legal journals, the Web of Science and Scopus databases include content that is too limited to be properly used for this purpose. The author suggests taking into account the citations from the Google Scholar database to evaluate European scientific legal journals.