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

Abstract

The present paper studies the internationality of Spanish scholarly journals indexed in Web of Science and Scopus on the basis of four key elements identified in the bibliographic review: articles in English, articles by foreign authors, international collaborations and foreign members in editorial teams. Research shows that subject area and access type are determinants in terms of the degree of internationality of the journals, as well as, to a lesser extent, publisher type. The Impact Factor (IF), flagship of bibliometric impact, does not correlate with any element of internationality, while the values of SJR and SNIP moderately correlate with the percentage of international collaborations. Foreign authors' participation is related with English language presence, revealing the orientation of the indexed Spanish journals towards the 'core' scientific countries. The presence of foreign members in committees is accompanied by that of foreign authors, even though a cause-effect relation cannot be proved. The study concludes providing some insights on future research lines.