Is there a way to automatically categorise a list of journals into disciplines?

Question

I have a list of references from a systematic review and I would like to produce some summary statistics of roughly how many come from various different disciplines.

Is there a way of doing this rough categorisation using either:

a) Some kind of master list of journals which I can use to cross reference with my lis (although journal title abbreviations may be a problem)

or even better

b) Uploading the reference list or DOIs to an online tool which will categorise it for me?

Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (paid) categorizes journals into disciplines. It is unclear here if you want to categorize journals or articles. Those are not the same thing. — Anonymous Physicist, May 30 '22 at 15:14
At least in my area of research that would seem to be impossible and unreasonable to do, as journals are confined only loosely to disciplines, papers are confined only loosely to disciplines, and the boundaries of disciplines themselves are not clearly defined. — Bryan Krause, May 30 '22 at 21:20
Consider the Journal of Chemical Physics and the Journal of Physical Chemistry, both real journals. Are they the same or different? — Jon Custer, May 30 '22 at 22:20
Does this answer your question? Is there an official, widely used subject classification? — Peter K., May 31 '22 at 22:46

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 31 '22 at 09:13

There are at least two comprehensive sources that I know of that provide reasonably credible mappings of thousands of journals to disciplines: the Scimago Journal Ranking (free) and the Clarivate Web of Science (library subscription required).

For your purposes, the advantage of Scimago is that it is free, which is a big advantage if you do not have access to Web of Science through your library. The disadvantage is that it does not seem to have any API that would let you automatically categorize journals as you would like to do in your option b). Web of Science, however, does have an API, which allows some automatic functionality, though programming would be required. That said, I am not sure if its API supports your specific use case: uploading journal identifiers and returning the journal discipline categorization. You would need to study the API to verify that.

Is there a way to automatically categorise a list of journals into disciplines?

1 Answers1