The full census, not just the top quartile
Our round-one count covered the Q1 slice. This is the whole shelf, modeled on Scimago's Computer Science journal rankings: every computer science journal in our 329-venue directory, 64 titles, ranked by the quartile the directory records.
| Recorded tier | CS journals | Share of the CS shelf |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 (top quartile) | 48 | 75% |
| Q2 | 16 | 25% |
| Q3 or Q4 | 0 | 0% |
The directory is a curated shelf, not the universe: it records no CS journal below Q2. Computer science also supplies 195 of the directory's 329 venues (64 journals and 131 conferences), which makes it the only discipline where the conference side outweighs the journal side two to one.
The Q2 quirk
Across all 188 journals in the directory, exactly 16 sit in Q2, and all 16 are computer science titles. Every other discipline's recorded journals (Biology, Medicine, Economics and the rest) are Q1 only. Read that as a property of this directory's construction, verified September 15, 2026: the CS shelf was built deeper, down into the second quartile, while the other fields list only their top titles. A CS author comparing venues here sees the realistic middle of the field; an author in another discipline sees only its summit.
Thirty-one subfields, one long tail
The 64 titles spread across 31 recorded subfields. Software Engineering leads with 8, Theory follows with 6, Programming Languages and Robotics hold 4 each, and then the shelf thins fast: 20 subfields carry one or two titles each, from Formal Methods to Visualization. For authors, the tail is the useful part; a two-title subfield means the directory's coverage there is a starting point, not a verdict, and our Submission Odds Checker flags the fields where the record is thin.
The recorded peaks
By recorded impact factor, the CS shelf peaks at ACM Computing Surveys (28, filed under Surveys), Nature Machine Intelligence (23.9) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (20.4). Two of the top three are not generalist CS titles at all, which is the same lesson as the subfield table: in this dataset, the prestige sits in the specialties.