Indonesian government has succeeded in increasing the number of local scientific
journals. However, in terms of quality, such as the number of citations and errors in
bibliographic writing still requires to be improved. This paper aims to explore the
problems in Indonesian scientific journals' evaluation system by comparing the system to
South Korea. The country has local journals like Indonesia. This paper uses references
desk for collecting the data. The paper is focused on discussing publishers and journal
citation databases. The conclusions are drawn by making arguments and reasons based
on critical thinking analyzes. At the end of the paper, recommendations are proposed to
optimize the development of journal performance in Indonesia.