The Arab Citation and Impact Factor index “ARCIF” on Saturday, October 25, listed 20 Syrian academic journals in its 2025 edition.

Marwan Al-Raeei, head of the ARCIF office at Damascus University, told the state news agency SANA that the indexed journals are published by several leading Syrian institutions:

• The Arabic Language Academy in Damascus
• Damascus University
• University of Latakia
• The Arab Board of Health Specializations
• The Arab Center for Research and Studies in Library and Information Sciences
• The Scientific Association of Colleges of Education in Arab Universities

He added that this inclusion significantly strengthens Syria’s research presence in the Arab region and beyond, and reflects a commitment to unifying publishing standards and improving the discoverability and citability of Arabic scholarly output.

Al-Raeei explained that the 20 Syrian journals are among 1,272 Arab journals covered by the 2025 ARCIF ranking, indicating what he called continuing growth in the country’s scientific research.

Who runs the ranking

ARCIF is a large Arabic database of citations for peer-reviewed scientific journals published in the Arab world. It provides comprehensive, credible, objective, reliable, and integrated multidisciplinary data, linking outputs and citation volumes for hundreds of thousands of Arabic-language articles across fields.

The index enables users to view, track, and analyze research data. It supports search, measurement, and trend analysis across 59 disciplines for Arabic scientific journals and articles.

It also offers high-quality scientific data from 1,006 Arab scholarly entities, which can be consulted, analyzed, and shared, and used to prepare research, set priorities, and inform policy decisions and research agendas.

Ranking criteria

ARCIF’s classification relies on several criteria, including:

• Total citations received by the journal
• ARCIF score value, averaged over the last three reports
• Subject area
• Timeliness and regularity of publication
• Date of establishment and continuity of the journal

Project goals

The ARCIF project sets out to:

• Provide a rigorous, standardized tool to evaluate and quantify the impact of Arab scientific journals
• Build a credible Arab measurement tool for research and scholarly publishing that serves as a reference in assessing Arab journals and identifying those most influential in their fields
• Supply data and indicators on Arab scholarly output, documenting it as an intellectual legacy and investment, restoring its status amid a lack of metrics that reflect its scale and importance, and enhancing its visibility within global knowledge indicators
• Help overcome foreign-language barriers faced by some Arab researchers when preparing studies for English-language journals with global impact factors
• Become an accepted benchmark used in ranking Arab universities within global university classification frameworks, in a way that does them justice and improves their standing internationally