DICE is a system created to provide information about the quality indicators of Spanish journals of Humanities and Social Sciences. These indicators can be obtained for a particular journal or for the complete group of journals of one area, thus journals can be related using the values of the indicators.

The result of each search strategy will always be a short entry for a journal or a group of journals which provides a summary of its characteristics. The title of the journal will be shown with a web link: by clicking on it, the complete entry with publishing details and quality indicators will be shown.

The search screen permits recovering entries with the following fields:

     Title of the journal

     Thematic area (selecting one of the areas from the pull-down menu).

     Area of knowledge (selecting one of the areas from the pull-down menu). The list of knowledge areas is provided by the Ministry of Sciences and Innovation.

     ISSN

     External evaluators : : selecting YES the system will recover those journals which have external evaluators for reviewing the collaborations sent to the publisher, and selecting NO, the system will recover those journals which do not have this method of evaluation.

     Databases: when you select one of the databases from the pull-down menu, the system recovers those journals which are indexed by the selected database.

     Evaluation of international dissemination: the user can select three values

• High visibility: the system will offer journals which have obtained a score which is equal to or higher than 12 for their presence in international databases.
• Medium visibility: the system will offer journals which have obtained between 6 and 11 points for their presence in international databases.
• Low visibility: the system will offer the journals which have obtained 5 or less points for their presence in international databases.

     Openness to external authors:: when YES is selected, the system will recover those journals which comply with this criterion, which means that at least 50 per cent of the works published in a year are from authors coming from organizations independent of the publishing institutions.

     Internationality of the contributions: : the user can select three values

• Low: between 0 and 32 per cent of contributions include at least one foreign author.
• Medium: between 33 and 65 per cent of contributions have at least one foreign author.
• High: between 66 and 100 per cent of the contributions have at least one foreign author.

     ANEP category: by choosing options A+, A, B or C, the system will recover journals which have the selected category assigned in the ANEP/FECYT system.

     ERIH category:by choosing options A, B or C the system will recover journals which have the selected category assigned by ERIH.

     CARHUS+ category: by choosing options A, B, C or D the system will recover journals which have the selected category assigned by CARHUS+.

In addition, the system permits searching all journals or just those journals included in the Latindex Catalogue that is, those which comply with 25 or more of the criteria established by this system. These journals are marked with the logo^C .

Only two fields permit the direct inclusion of information (Title and ISSN). The others are completed by using the pull-down menus.

Combined searching between fields may be carried out (for instance, Geography journals which have external reviewers) as the boolean operator AND allows searching both fields at the same time.

Furthermore, DICE permits access to an alphabetical list of journals (always associated to their publication details and to their quality indicators), to an alphabetical list of databases, which will permit detecting databases included in DICE, their main characteristics and the quality criteria which they require of a journal to be included, and to a list of subjects in databases , which allows publishers to know which databases are the most relevant of its speciality.

When carrying out a search in a group of journals, the user will obtain a summary including title of the journal, year of the first issue, area of knowledge of the database and a list of the quality criteria applied in DICE. The user will be able to sort the results obtained depending on each of the criteria. To do so, he/she only will have to click on the head of each column.