Bibliometric assessment of national scientific journals

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the national orientation and citation impact of scientific journals using bibliometric methods, analyzing trends and factors influencing their international and domestic roles up to 2019.

Contribution

It introduces a new operational definition of national orientation and applies it to analyze journals from former socialist countries, considering various influencing factors.

Findings

National journals show varying degrees of international collaboration.

Language and access status significantly affect journal impact.

Historical and political contexts influence national journal characteristics.

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. 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.