Editorial H‐score as a metric of inner authenticity for national scientific journals—Pilot study for the field of pedagogy

Abstract

There is evidence that national scientific journals are important for local communities despite their limited audience due to national languages and topics, like in pedagogy. However, it is not easy to assess the level of scientific rigour of local journals, as most do not have available scientometric data and are often published in minority languages. We hypothesize that a possible manifestation of a latent trait of inner authenticity of the scientific journal (meaning the journal is accepted by a community interested in developing the field which conducts internationally accepted research) could be H‐index of the editorial board members. To test this approach, we evaluated H‐index and gender of editorial board members (n = 490) from 17 Czech and Slovak national science‐oriented scientific pedagogical journals which were not indexed or indexed in Erih+ or Scopus, and compared this with the five lowest‐rated journals from the same field indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The H‐index of editorial board members was somewhat higher in indexed journals with those from WoS showing higher scores, and the number of board members with no discernable H‐index was far greater in non‐indexed journals. Editorial boards of journals indexed in WoS were mostly male, compared to a dominance of women on boards of non‐indexed journals. Acknowledging the limited sample, it appears that the H‐index of editorial board members may be a way to value national scientific journals.