Journal editors and journal indexes: Internationalization pressures in the semi‐periphery of the world of science

Abstract

Peer‐reviewed journals are routinely monitored in the world of science, especially on the basis of their performance in international scholarly indexes such as Web of Science and Scopus. While critics have highlighted the bias and 'unintended consequences' of these instruments, it is not at all clear how these indexes are changing the ways in which research takes place. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities and problems facing scientific journals within this environment. By means of 12 qualitative interviews with editors‐in‐chief of WoS‐indexed journals edited in Chile, we analyse the editors' perceptions and strategies to surf within this environment. The article highlights the current tensions that indexation brings for the journals and some strategies to cope with them, the negotiation processes with their traditional audiences, and the conflicts that emerge in the current internationalization processes led by international scientific indexes. Finally, the paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities and pitfalls that index‐led internationalization has for journals, especially in so‐called semi‐peripheral communities.

Co‐authoring with undergraduate students: An emerging process from the semi‐periphery of the world of science

“…Journals and their editors in the semi‐periphery have started to feel pressure due to the trend towards internationalization of higher education and knowledge dissemination. They seek new strategies to improve journal impact, relevance, and visibility as well as journal inclusion and standing in various databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus (Koch & Vanderstraeten, 2021). At the same time, many of these journals suffer from internal editorial policies and processes that impede their strategic development.…”

“…As a result, these researchers, journals, publishing houses, and databases have become the centre of the international publication landscape. Scholars from other parts of the world that Koch and Vanderstraeten (2021) call 'the semi-periphery of the world of science' and Macan et al (2019) refer to as the 'scientific (semi-) periphery' are trying to catch up. While these countries have their own traditions to advance science and disseminate research, for many of their scholars publishing in respectable, and especially highranking, international peer-reviewed journals in English is very much a terra incognita.…”

“…However, in the past couple of decades, internationalization of higher education in these countries has led to the growth of research productivity, which also indicates an increase in effective and creative scientific collaborations (Koch & Vanderstraeten, 2021; Szuflita‐Zurawska & Basinska, 2021). How some of these collaborations involve students, particularly undergraduates, and result in a publication in Web of Science and Scopus‐indexed journals is not clear.…”

How do editors use editorials to lead their journals? Insights from the field of human resource management

“…As Hyland (2023) noticed, ‘academic publishing is now a global industry’ (p. 1) that involves unprecedented numbers of papers, authors, journals, publishers, and languages of publications. This highly competitive environment presents a challenge for top‐ranking academic journals to maintain their leading positions and for developing journals to establish their identity, audience, and reputation (Koch & Vanderstraeten, 2021; Miao & Huang, 2021; Wang et al, 2021). If ‘journal development … needs to be a perfect mix of both small‐ and large‐scale changes’ (Smart, 2019, p. 103), then attending to editorials could bring incremental improvements to advance the journal.…”

Scholarly journal publishing in Australia

“…Internationalization has brought about challenges and tensions for scholarly journals that must negotiate between traditional and new audiences (Koch & Vanderstraeten, 2021). Two factors contribute to this internationalization trend, one is the dominant metric culture in research systems, that puts pressure on journals to be indexed in major citation databases (e.g., Scopus) (Koch & Vanderstraeten, 2021) and the other is increasing a country's share in the global research output by having national journals indexed in databases (Basu, 2010; Leta, 2012) which has implications for the international prestige of a country's research. Getting indexed in citation databases affects the national orientation of journals (i.e., they publish more international articles) and their citation impact (Moed et al, 2020).…”