Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Mexican scholarly journal earns Latindex Catalogue inclusion by meeting editorial quality criteria.
- Is an instance
A bibliometric study uses Latindex coverage to count Iberoamerican OA journals.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Excluding Latindex-indexed journals from a university's recognised-publications list.
- Not an instance
Misrepresenting Latindex Directory listing as endorsement of editorial quality (which requires Catalogue inclusion).
Editorial commentary
Latindex (Sistema Regional de Informacion en Linea para Revistas Cientificas de America Latina, el Caribe, Espana y Portugal) is a regional bibliographic information system for scholarly journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. It was established in 1997 and is coordinated from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), operating as a cooperative network of national centres across the participating countries rather than a single centralised body.
The three components
Latindex is structured in tiers that are frequently conflated but answer different questions. The Directory is a broad, largely self-reported registry: any qualifying regional journal can be listed with basic bibliographic metadata, with no editorial-quality review implied. The Catalogue is the evaluated tier — a journal is checked against a documented, publicly available set of editorial-quality and formal-presentation criteria (an ISSN, a defined periodicity, identified editorial-board affiliations, peer-review documentation, and a stated minimum number of criteria met out of the published checklist) before Catalogue inclusion is granted. A separate Latindex-OA component tracks which catalogued titles are open access. Only Catalogue inclusion functions as a quality signal; Directory listing alone does not.
How it differs from SciELO and AmeliCA
Latindex indexes and certifies journal metadata; it does not host full text. SciELO is the full-text hosting and technical-publishing layer many of the same journals also belong to, with its own separate, stricter admission bar (including mandatory structured XML). AmeliCA is a cooperative diamond-OA publishing-infrastructure initiative, closer in spirit to a shared technical/financial support service than to a bibliographic index. Latindex actively cross-references and collaborates with both, plus Redalyc and DOAJ, but a journal’s presence in one does not imply presence, or an equivalent quality bar, in another.
Worked example / counter-example
A Colombian social-science journal that meets Latindex’s documented editorial-quality criteria (verified periodicity, identifiable editorial board, ISSN, stated peer-review process) is admitted to the Latindex Catalogue and can cite that status in funding and evaluation submissions. A journal that only appears in the base Directory, without having been assessed against the Catalogue checklist, has not been vetted for editorial quality by Latindex — treating Directory presence as a quality endorsement is a common but incorrect reading of the system.
References
- latindex.org, Latindex programme documentation (UNAM).
Also known as
Latindex · Sistema Regional Latindex
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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