Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
The scientific journals have become in the first tool and vehicle of the scientific communication. Progressively to the traditional book, for its own difficulties of adapting to a digital world, has lost weight, even in the social, legal and humanistic areas.
One of the constant reasons for the continuous recognition of the journals, as engines of scientific visibility has been its capacity for adapting to the new channels of processing and diffusion of science. Similarly, the scientific periodic publications are known and recognized for the scientific community regarding of its editorial quality, its visibility grade and its impact levels in the scientific production, measured both for the cites in other publications as well for its presence in alternative metrics.
Precisely, these three factors (editorial quality, visibility and impact factor) differ drastically the scientific publications among the excellent ones and the rest of them. Because one of the reasons of success of the journals is precisely that the researchers and the readers can identify the journals of high quality from those that are not or are in process.
To index journals is to “classify” them, to give them an order, for multiple criteria, even though that in the scientific community it is placed as a preferential factor the impact and the citations of this publication in others of the same level.
The indexations and their classification in quartiles are a simple way of hierarchizing the journals in the main indexes of the world depending on the quartile in which they are located. As we indicated in another post, the Q1 journals are the ones that occupy the best places and therefore are the most prestigious and famous in their classifications because they have gotten for the year of its valorization the best and most numerous cites of their journals. Therefore, very few journals have the possibility to access to these levels of international excellence and even more if they are published outside the scientific-technical and Anglo- Saxon fields, since the lingua franca is by far the English and the technical- sanitary studies are the most thriving internationally.
The most recognized indexations at an international level are the ones that are generated from the databases of WoS (Web of Science), from the Clarivate Analytics company, which main product and most renowned in the world, since decades, is the Journal Citation Reports. This portal contains approximately 11,600 journals from all areas and countries of the world, with a predominance of English and the Anglo-Saxon world. The list, like all its services, are nowadays private and only accessible from individual or collective subscriptions (this is the case of Universities or research centers).
In second place, and in progressive growing, it is found the database Scopus, which counts with two great independent indexers and with differentiated results: CiteScore and SJR (Scimago Journal Ranking), both with public profile and accessible since any Internet connection: http://www.scimagojr.com/, https://journalmetrics.scopus.com/. Citescore with 22.500 indexed journals and SJR with 28.500.
These portals are basic tools of every researcher that would like to be updated with the scientific publications of greater prestige, visibility and recognition at an international level.
“Comunicar” has published, as service for their readers and authors, a ranking of Spanish journals, especially of Communication, Education and Cultural Studies with the three most known indexations: https://goo.gl/JGHkZL. Together with WoS and Scopus, it is also collected in Google, as macro-basis of global information, that in its academic section (Google Scholar Metrics: GSM), measures the journals annually for their H index (look the other post of this blog), according to their languages: https://goo.gl/Y68m8n.
