Journal Check
Install — free

For Google Scholar

See journal rankings on Google Scholar — SJR, ABDC, FT50, CORE.

Google Scholar shows you papers, not journals. Journal Check adds the missing layer: a coloured ranking badge next to every result, so you know at a glance whether you're looking at an SJR Q1, an ABDC A*, an FT50 entry — or nothing at all.

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What Google Scholar doesn't tell you

Google Scholar deliberately stays neutral about journal quality. There's no quartile, no impact factor, no list membership shown on the results page. You see the title, authors, venue and citation count — and have to guess the rest.

That works for senior researchers who already know which venues matter in their field. For everyone else — PhD students choosing a target journal, peer reviewers triaging references, supervisors checking a draft's reference list — it's a daily friction. Journal Check fills the gap without sending you to a second tab.

How the Google Scholar integration works

On scholar.google.com the extension reads each result's DOI directly from the result's DOM (Scholar exposes it on the "Cite" and link metadata). When a DOI isn't present — which happens for older or non-indexed venues — it falls back to the journal's ISSN, or to a title+year lookup against our backend.

The identifier goes to api.journal-check.com, which returns every ranking we hold for that journal in a single batched response. A coloured badge is then injected next to the result title, showing the strongest signal first (e.g. SJR Q1 · ABDC A* · FT50). Hover the badge to expand the full breakdown.

Which rankings show up

  • SJR quartile — SCImago, 9,664 journals, refreshed annually. The closest thing to a universal indicator across disciplines.
  • ABDC — Australian Business Deans Council, A* / A / B / C, the most-cited business and management list.
  • FT50 — Financial Times' 50-journal business list, used for promotion and tenure decisions at most B-schools.
  • CORE — Computing Research and Education ranking for CS conferences, A* / A / B / C.
  • OpenAlex citation impact — percentile-banded fallback for journals not in any of the above lists.

Why a missing badge is itself useful

On Google Scholar you'll occasionally hit a journal that aggressively markets itself as "indexed and ranked" but appears in none of SJR, ABDC, FT50 or CORE. The badge area stays empty (or only shows a very low OpenAlex percentile). That gap is one of the simplest predatory-journal signals you can get without leaving the search results page.

Privacy on Google Scholar

The extension runs only on scholar.google.com. It reads DOIs and ISSNs from the page DOM — never your search queries, never page content, never your Scholar profile. Only identifiers go to our API. See the full privacy policy for details.

Works elsewhere too

The same badges appear on PubMed, arXiv and Semantic Scholar. The styling adapts to feel native to each host.