Development of a quality assessment system for national scientific publications in Uzbekistan based on UzSCI: international experience, rating methodology, and digital platform model

This article develops the methodological and technical foundations for creating the UzSCI (Uzbekistan Scientific Citation Index) rating system to assess the quality of national scholarly journals in Uzbekistan. The study analyzes international experience, including the Journal Impact Factor used in Web of Science and CiteScore used in Scopus, as well as journal selection and re-evaluation practices and the principles of responsible metrics reflected in DORA and the Leiden Manifesto. The paper argues that a citation-only model is insufficient for national journals at the current stage of citation data accumulation. Therefore, an integrated multi-criteria rating model is proposed, combining journal impact factor with peer-review quality, editorial transparency, website functionality, international indexing, DOI/ISSN availability, digital author communication, completeness of journal content in UzSCI, and platform usage indicators. The article also presents a technical model of the UzSCI platform, including database architecture, journal dashboards, article metadata, citation parsing, anti-manipulation mechanisms, API integration, expert verification, and open ranking dashboards. The proposed model can strengthen healthy competition among national journals, support objective selection of journals recommended for publishing dissertation results, and gradually align Uzbekistanʼs scholarly publishing system with international standards.