Assessing internationality of scholarly journals through foreign authorship patterns: the case of major journals in information science, and scientometrics

Abstract

This article reports findings from a study of patterns of foreign authorship of articles, and international composition of journal editorial boards in five leading journals in the field of information science, and scientometrics. The study covers an American journal and four European journals. Bibliographic data about foreign authors and their national affiliation from five selected years of publication were analyzed for all journals. The foreign input of articles were extremely high in Information Processing & Management, and Scientometrics, and were relatively low in the other three journals. The number of foreign countries contributing in all journals have increased rapidly since 1996. Canada, England, Belgium, Netherlands, China, and Spain were the countries with high contributions in JASIST. The authors from the USA have dominated the foreign-authored articles in all European journals. A simple linear regression analysis showed that 60% of variation in the proportion of foreign-authored articles in the set of five journals over the selected years could be explained by the percentage of foreign members on the editorial boards of the journals.