Author: Ignacio Aguaded – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
We are in a global universe, today science has no borders and except for the idiomatic, surpassed with the English lingua franca, investigations move around the world with a fluency previously unsuspected.
World-first level scientific journals have as a basic principle their international vocation in their subjects, their approaches, the origin of their authors and readers, their languages (especially English) … Their scientific community is global, even analyzing local samples, their approach is always universal.
In this sense, an explicit quality criteria that readers and authors must value when selecting their focus journals is the international projection of the publication, with clear indications of overcoming the geographical and even linguistic and cultural borders that in Social Sciences have been so preponderant.
The large databases of international prestige (WoS and Scopus) are very aware of this international factor that usually generates greater impact in its main indexers (Journal Citation Reports in WoS and SJR and CiteScore in Scopus), although the nordic, technical and anglophone bias is more than palpable, among other reasons because of the infrastructure itself of science and the unproportional distribution of the scientific community in the world. The countries of the North, the English language and the technical-exact disciplines have an overwhelming with the international presence that can only be overcome with internationalization and other languages (such as Spanish and Chinese), the promotion of the Humanities and Social Sciences as maximums exponents of science that join the circuit of scientific journals and finally to «empower» the South as a subject of science, with the training of researchers and scientific endowments.
The scientific journals of first level are always publications with a deep and constant international vocation and a worldwide visibility.
