ORBITORBIT reads your abstract, works out its subject areas, and matches them against about 98,000 journals — showing what each one costs to publish in, in rupees, whether it is open access and independently listed, and how much it published last year. Journals that have stopped publishing are never suggested. The whole tool is free and takes no credit.
Journal quartiles come from Scopus and Web of Science, and impact factors come from Clarivate. All three are licensed commercial datasets. ORBIT sells credits, so republishing that data without a licence is not something this site will do — even when a file happens to be freely downloadable, which is not the same as being freely reusable.
What ORBIT shows instead is open data an author can check for themselves: the real publication fee, DOAJ listing, membership of the CWTS Leiden core sources list, the country and publisher, how much the journal publishes, and an ORBIT Tier calculated by us. The tier ranks a journal against others in its own field, because a citation rate that is exceptional in history is unremarkable in molecular biology — a single global ranking would sort by discipline and call the result quality.
ORBIT can suggest from about 98,000 journals because a suggestion needs only public metadata about what a journal has published. It can format to, and run a readiness check against, a much smaller set — the journals whose submission rules a human has verified against the publisher's own page.
Suggestions carry an ORBIT-ready badge where both are true. A journal without the badge can still be exactly the right choice; ORBIT simply cannot format or check against it yet, and says so rather than implying a coverage it does not have.
It is classified into subject areas and then discarded. ORBIT stores only the subjects that came back, keyed by a one-way hash of the text, so that running the same abstract again is instant and costs nothing. The abstract itself is never written to the database and the stored row carries no user id.
That is deliberate. An unpublished abstract is the most sensitive document this site handles, and a record of what researchers are working on before they publish is not something ORBIT has any business keeping.
An ORCID iD, if you add one, is handled the same way. ORBIT reads your publication history from OpenAlex for that one request, uses it to reorder journals your abstract already matched, and keeps nothing.
Find a Journal has a second tab, Journal history, for a journal you already have in mind or one on your shortlist. Type its name or ISSN and pick it from the list. The profile is free, needs a free account, and takes no credit.
Every note on it is a fact with a number and a year, never a verdict. ORBIT's paper counts come from OpenAlex and Crossref, which include every item with a DOI, so they usually run a little higher than Scopus's for the same journal. Scopus and Web of Science status is licensed, so the profile links to Scopus rather than copying it.
Because we are not licensed to. Journal quartiles come from Scopus and Web of Science, which are commercial databases owned by Elsevier and Clarivate, and impact factors are Clarivate's. Those datasets are licensed, and ORBIT sells credits — so republishing them inside a paid product without a licence is not something we are willing to do, even where a file happens to be downloadable. We checked the paid routes again in September 2026: the free Scopus API is for non-commercial use only, and the free Web of Science tier allows 50 requests a day. Neither is open to a paid product. What ORBIT shows instead is open data: the CWTS Leiden core list, DOAJ listing, the real publication fee, how much a journal publishes, and our own field-relative tier. Any tool showing you a quartile is either licensed for it or should not be.
Usually not, and the page marks which ones it can. ORBIT can suggest from about 98,000 journals because a suggestion only needs public metadata about what a journal publishes. It can format to, and readiness-check against, a much smaller set — the journals whose submission rules a human has verified against the publisher's own page. Suggestions carry an ORBIT-ready badge where both are true. A journal does not become formattable by being popular, and we would rather show you the honest gap than quietly imply a coverage we do not have.
No, and this is the distinction most likely to cost you money. ORBIT reports three states: a fee of a stated amount, a fee stated as zero, and no fee published. Only the second means free to publish. The third, which covers about seven in ten journals (27,813 of 98,215 state a fee, counted in September 2026), means nobody has recorded a figure, and that covers everything from genuinely free journals to subscription journals to ones that simply never published their price. ORBIT will not colour a blank field as free. Fees are shown in rupees: exact where the journal states rupees, and marked ≈ with the rate date where converted. Where it matters, check on the journal's own site before you submit.
No. Nothing on this page is an acceptance rate, because journals do not publish them openly and a number invented for that would be the most misleading thing we could put on the screen. The match percentage says how much of what a journal publishes is in your subject, worked out from its actual published output. The Reach / Match / Safe bands compare journals within your own shortlist by citation impact and how much they publish. Both describe the journal. Neither predicts a decision made by an editor who has read your paper.
It is classified into subject areas and then not kept. ORBIT stores the subjects that came back, keyed by a one-way hash of the text, so that running the same abstract again is instant and costs nothing — but the abstract itself is never written to the database and the stored row carries no user id, so it cannot be traced back to you or reassembled. That is deliberate: an unpublished abstract is the most sensitive document this site ever handles, and a record of what researchers are working on before they publish is not something ORBIT has any business keeping.
It is built from OpenAlex, an openly licensed catalogue of the scholarly record, and rebuilt periodically — the page states the date of the build it is using. Fees, fee waivers, other charges and publication times also come from DOAJ, which releases its journal data openly. It covers journals that have an ISSN and have actually published recently, which is a deliberate safety filter: a journal that has stopped publishing will not be suggested to you, because finding that out yourself costs months. Every field shown comes from that open data, and the page names what it does not have as plainly as what it does.
Yes, and it is optional. Add your iD and ORBIT reads your publication history from OpenAlex, an open catalogue, not from ORCID's own service. Your history can reorder journals that already match your abstract, at a quarter of the abstract's weight, and journals you have published in are marked with how many papers you have there. It never adds a journal your abstract did not match, because a researcher changing field is exactly when their history points the wrong way. If OpenAlex links your iD to more than one author record, ORBIT does not guess whose papers they are and matches on the abstract alone. Nothing about your iD or your record is kept.
No, because the list no longer exists. UGC discontinued the UGC-CARE journal list in 2025: a notice in February, and a formal public notice in July. The old list stays on the UGC website for reference only, and universities now judge journals against UGC's suggested parameters themselves. A tool still showing a UGC-CARE badge is showing a list UGC has stopped maintaining.
Yes. Find a Journal has a second tab, Journal history. Start typing a journal's name or ISSN and pick it from the list, or tap "View this journal's history" on any suggestion. You see its papers and citations per year, the countries its authors were in last year, what it charges and how that changed, the open lists it is on (including the Norwegian Register's level for each year), how it handles papers according to Crossref, and any retractions. It is free, needs a free account, and takes no credit. The data comes from OpenAlex, Crossref, DOAJ, the Norwegian Register, the US National Library of Medicine and Wikidata, and a profile is kept for 30 days so the next look is instant.
Because they count different things. ORBIT's counts come from OpenAlex and Crossref, which include every item with a DOI, editorials and corrections too. Scopus counts only the items it has indexed. So the yearly shape is usually the same and ORBIT's numbers run a little higher. ORBIT cannot show a journal's Scopus or Web of Science status, because that data is licensed, so the profile links you to Scopus to check it yourself.