Globalization of national journals: investigating the growth of international authorship

Abstract

This study investigated changes in the internationality of national publishers' journals for the period 1990–2013. The patterns of foreign and interregional authorship in papers and references of 4,199 journals from 3,529 publishers were analyzed. The results revealed that foreign authorship increased from 36% to 62% during the period, but interregional authorship only grew from 77% to 82%. The growth in internationality is not the same across disciplines and regions of the world. Agricultural sciences, psychiatry/psychology, and economics and business have the least number of foreign authors, while journals in space science, mathematics, and physics have the most. According to the number of both foreign‐authored papers and foreign‐authored citations, clinical medicine is one of the least international fields. Latin America and Middle East publishers have a greater tendency to publish papers from authors in their countries. In contrast, national publishers in North America have become considerably more international over time. Russia, China, and Brazil publish the least number of foreign authored‐papers in their journals, while Switzerland's journals publish the most.

Internationalization of scientific publishing over time: Analysing publishers and fields differences

“…They stated that a more comprehensive view about internationalization could be obtained by using absolute and relative measures together. Although the degree of journal internationality was also previously estimated using foreign authorship as an absolute measure (Gazni, ), neither the concept nor measure of internationality was well defined, so we need a more accurate and complete definition and criteria to assess the extent of journal internationality (Tierney, ; ). This study is limited because it only uses Euclidean distance, whereas journal internationality could also be examined using other relative and absolute measures, together or individually.…”

“…Internationality concept is being applied ambiguously, particularly with respect to the scientific journals (Perakakis, Taylor, Buela-Casal, & Checa, 2005); however, it is often applied as a measure of quality (Jordens, 2007). The geographic distribution of the journal's authors (Zsindely, Schubert, & Braun, 1982), references (Gazni, 2015), readers (Wormell, 1998), citers (Ren & Rousseau, 2002), and editorial boards (Gutiérrez & López-Nieva, 2001) are all applied for checking the degree of the journal internationality (Buela-Casal, Perakakis, Taylor, & Checa, 2006) using bibliometric measures to compute internationality (Kortelainen, 2001). Measuring these over time allows us to see if the journal (and the science) is becoming more or less international (Frandsen, 2005).…”

“…Although rare studies try to measure the degree of journal internationality at the world level and over the long term, the level of increase in the internationality of national publishers’ journals during 1990–2013 has also been investigated (Gazni, ). This study found that foreign and interregional authorship in both journal papers and references has increased.…”

Mapping the History of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator: 30 Years of Publication (1990–2019)

“…Academia is seeing continuous growth in foreign authorship (Gazni, 2015). In fact, some countries, such as China and South Korea, award a tenure evaluation incentive or otherwise compensate the author(s) with monetary incentives for international journal publications (H.…”

Internationality of Spanish scholarly journals indexed in Web of Science and Scopus

“…Studies on journals' internationality, both at national or international level, usually take only a limited number of journals on a specific subject area. Works by Gazni (2015) and Gazni & Ghaseminik (2016), who collected data from thousands of journals in any subject area and from any region, are an exception. They discovered that foreign authorship depended on the region of publication and on the subject areas (STM beating SSH areas), and that titles indexed in WoS were growing international over time ("globalized", according to the authors).…”