Abstract
Nationally oriented scientific-scholarly journals are considered from a methodological-informetric viewpoint, analysing data extracted from Scimago Journal Rank based on Scopus. An operational definition is proposed of a journal’s degree of national orientation based on the geographical distribution of its publishing or citing authors, and the role of international collaboration and a country’s total publication output is discussed. A comprehensive analysis is presented of trends up until 2019 in national orientation and citation impact of national journals entering Scopus, extending outcomes in earlier studies. A method to analyse national journals of given countries is applied to the set of former USSR republics and Eastern and Central European states which were under socialism, distinguishing between domestic and foreign national journals. The possible influence is highlighted of factors related to a journal’s access status, publication language and subject field, international scientific migration and collaboration, database coverage policies, the size of a national research community, historical-political factors and national research assessment and funding policies.
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig1_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig2_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig3_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig4_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig5_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig6_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig7_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig8_HTML.png)
![](http://media.springernature.com/m312/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11192-021-03883-5/MediaObjects/11192_2021_3883_Fig9_HTML.png)
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acharya, A., Verstak, A., Suzuki, H., Henderson, S., Iakhiaev, M., Chiung, C., Lin, Y., & Shetty, N. (2014). Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.2217v1.pdf.
Aleixandre-Benavent, R., Peruginelli, G. De Filippo, D., & Sanz-Casado, E. (2019). International visibility and impact of national journals. A comparative study of Spanish and Italian legal journals. Lecture presented at the Research Evaluation in the SSH Conference-RESSH (2019), Valencia, Spain. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/10261/219361.
Basu, A. (2010). Does a country’s scientific ‘productivity’ depend critically on the number of country journals indexed? Scientometrics, 82(3), 507–516. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0186-8.
Braun, T., & Nagy, J. (1982). A comparative evaluation of some Hungarian and other national biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics journals. Scientometrics, 4(6), 439–455. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02021140.
Gazni, A. (2015). Globalization of national journals: investigating the growth of international authorship. Learned Publishing, 28(3), 195–204.
Hladchenko, M., & Moed, H. F. (2021). National orientation of Ukrainian journals: means-ends decoupling in a semi-peripheral state. Scientometrics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03844-4.
Kim, B., Kim, Y., & Kang, J. (2018). Analysis of the citation impact of national journals toward SCIE journals on JCR ranking. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, 23(2), 1–24.
Kulczycki, E., Engels, T. C. E., Pölönen, J., Bruun, K., Dušková, M., Guns, R., et al. (2018). Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from eight European countries. Scientometrics, 116, 463–486.
Kulczycki, E., & Rozkosz, E. A. (2017). Does an expert-based evaluation allow us to go beyond the Impact Factor? Experiences from building a ranking of national journals in Poland. Scientometrics, 111, 417–442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2261-x.
Leta, J. (2012). Brazilian growth in the mainstream science: The role of human resources and national journals. Journal of Scientometric Research, 1(1), 44–52.
Ma, Z. (2019). The Relevance of National Journals from a Chinese Perspective. In W. Glänzel, H. F. Moed, U. Schmoch, & M. Thelwall (Eds.), Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators (pp. 505–562). Lausanne, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Moed, H. F. (2005). Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. Dordrecht (Netherlands): Springer.
Moed, H.F. (2017). Applied Evaluative Informetrics. Springer, ISBN 978–3–319–60521–0 (hard cover); 978–3–319–60522–7 (E-Book), DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60522-7, XXI + 312 pp.
Moed, H. F., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V., & Lopez-Illescas, C. (2020a). Are nationally oriented journals indexed in Scopus becoming more international? The effect of publication language and access modality. Journal of Informetrics, 14(2), 101011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101011.
Moed, H.F., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V., and Lopez-Illescas, C. (2020b). Corrigendum to “Are nationally oriented journals indexed in Scopus becoming more international? The effect of publication language and access modality.”J. Informetrics 14 (2020) 101011]. Journal of Informetrics, 14, 101078.
Narin, F., Stevens, K., Anderson, J., Collins, P., Irvine, J., Isard, P., & Martin, B. (1988). On-line approaches to measuring national scientific output: A cautionary tale. Science and public policy, 15(3), 153–161.
Pölönen, J., Guns, R., Kulczycki, E., Sivertsen, G., & Engels, T. C. E. (2020). National lists of scholarly publication channels: An overview and recommendations for their construction and maintenance. Journal of Data and Information Science, 1, 0004. https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2021-0004.
Scopus (2020). Scopus Source Title list. Version April 2020. Available at https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content.
Uzun, A. (2004). Assessing internationality of scholarly journals through foreign authorship patterns: the case of major journals in information science, and scientometrics. Scientometrics, 61(3), 457–465. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:scie.0000045121.26810.35.
Vargas, R. A., de Souza, A., Vanz, S., & Stumpf, I. R. C. (2014). The role of National journals on the rise in Brazilian Agricultural Science Publications in Web of Science. Journal of Scientometric Research, 3(1), 28–36. https://doi.org/10.4103/2320-0057.143698.
Zitt, M., & Bassecoulard, E. (1998). Internationalization of scientific journals: a measurement based on publication and citation and scope. Scientometrics, 41(1–2), 255–271.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Moed, H.F., de Moya-Anegon, F., Guerrero-Bote, V. et al. Bibliometric assessment of national scientific journals. Scientometrics 126, 3641–3666 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03883-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03883-5