The university's 6 journals are now part of the exclusive group of 7,165 journals included in the Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI), a database which contains journals that are being evaluated to become part of the Web of Science Core Collection, a database known for having high quality scientific products and an international impact categorized according to the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index.     

The ESCI index contains journals from all over the world, where only 17 are from Ecuador, in other words 35% of the Ecuadorian journals in the index belong to UPS.

In March 2017, the university announced that its journal "Sophia" was the first to be part of this privileged group, now the university's other 5 journals have become part of the index: ALTERIDAD, a journal on education, INGENIUS, journal on science and technology, LA GRANJA, journal on life sciences, RETOS, journal on administration economics sciences, UNIVERSITAS, journal social and human sciences.

The university's journals being indexed to ESCI will improve the visibility of UPS at an international level, thus providing a recognized quality brand for its transparency in selection processes, ponderable citations and a higher level of potential journals to generate consortiums where university researchers will be able to publish their research.

The university's General Editor, Luis Álvarez, said that this important achievement is the result of the constant work of the different editors of ABYA-YALA, the editorial team, the support of UPS officials, and the advice of Grupo Comunicar.