Page 5 - IDEA Studie 17 2017 Mistni casopisy ve Scopusu

Study 17 / 2017
Local journals in Scopus2
DECEMBER 2017
Vít Macháček and Martin Srholec
Summary
 The primary purpose of scientific journals is the critical reflection and sharing of research results. Nonetheless, articles in these journals have become an instrument for the evaluation of science, on the basis of which funding or career promotion decisions are often made. This adds other incentives to publish beyond the desire to share new knowledge. Evaluation methodology, popularly known as the "coffee grinder", has significantly boosted these secondary incentives. It is a question whether the process of scientific publishing pursues other goals than the original, praiseworthy intention to sharing of new valuable knowledge.
 We focus on journals indexed by the Scopus citation database. If a journal meets the criteria for indexing, it becomes branded to be scientific, which is then blindly used in evaluation. However, not all that glitters is gold. There exist vast differences among indexed journals in the way they contribute to the development of scientific knowledge. Indexing alone, thus, sometimes means no more than the journal has a publicly available description of the peer review process, English language abstracts and titles and full content available online. In addition to top journals, in which seminal scientific work is published, many marginal to dubious titles are also indexed.
 In this study, we analyse journals on the basis of the affiliation of their contributing authors. We track how many articles originate from authors based in the same country, and even in the same institution, which publishes the journal. We also take into account the concentration of authors from just a handful of countries and institutions. We are not concerned, thus, with the citation impact of journals, as is typical in studies of this type, but instead we offer a less traditional look at who publishes in them. This is an issue worth
2 This study received support from the research programme Strategy AV21 of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Preliminary results of this study were presented at the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board meeting in Prague on November 3rd, 2017. We would like to thank Štěpán Jurajda, Daniel Münich, Michael Šebek and participants at the aforementioned meeting for valuable comments and suggestions. Any inaccuracies, omissions, errors and opinions are however down to the authors.
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