Mapping the global
landscape of journals
Mikael Laakso & Janne Pölönen

Contents

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The problem
What are the consequences
Towards a solution
Multilingualism
References

A major inspiration and strong reading
recommendation for anyone interested in this topic

Khanna, S., Ball, J., Alperin, J. P., & Willinsky, J. (2022).
Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step ina vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies, 3 (4):912–930. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228

The problem
There are now more scholarly journals than ever before, publishing an
increasing total number of articles every year (Bornmann, Haunschild &Mutz 2021).
Change in this space is constant, yet comprehensive knowledge about
what and why changes are happening still lacks a lot of scope anddepth, mostly due to the limitations in available data.
There is a large number of journals that are currently invisible to mostbibliometric research (see e.g. Khanna, Ball, Alperin et al 2022) .
Even if data sources would be more complete the key obstacle for theirextended use in research purposes following open science approaches
is their commercial and proprietary nature.

What are the consequences
What might come as a surprise to many is that we do nothave comprehensive answers to the following questions:
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How many scholarly journals are there?
How many articles do they publish?
In what languages do they publish?
How are they divided into publishers?
How many are associated with a scholarly society?
How are they divided across research areas?
How are they divided geographically?
How many are publishing Open Access?

What are the consequences (cont.)
If we would have a solid common data foundation it wouldenable research into the changing landscape of journal andstudying e.g. the following phenomena:
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Creation of new journals
Publisher changes for journals
Merging journals
Journal renaming/re-scoping
Momentum of journals towards internationalization
Changing publication models
Discontinued journals
Disappeared journals

Towards a solution
There is a lot of public data available about journals available in different
datasets and through different services
The ISSN International Center provides free access to standardised metadata
for all journalsThe/One approach to start building a foundation based on open data:
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Collect as wide and broad list of journals globally based on ISSN numbers
Deduplicate
Query the ISSN center for standardised metadata for all journals

Towards a solution (cont.)Towards a solution (cont.)
Our preliminary dataset is aggregated from ﬁve local and global information
sources including a total of 152,644 unique journals matched with bibliographic
metadata records from the International ISSN Centre

Multilingualism

Multilingualism (cont.)

Conclusions
Recently started ongoing research, but…
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Early evidence paints a much more globally diverse and multilingual
landscape than selective commercial databases can provide.
There is a lot of potential for increasing the visibility, discoverability, andinclusion of more scholarly journals into bibliometric research.
Some way of crowdsourcing metadata for these journals would be needed.
Methods for managing data additions, changes, and forks could probablylean towards systems and practices familiar from open source softwaredevelopment.

References
Bornmann, L., Haunschild, R. & Mutz, R. (2021). Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve
approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8,224. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00903-w
Bruns, A., Cakir, Y., Kaya, S., & Beidaghi, S. (2022). ISSN-Matching of Gold OA Journals (ISSN-GOLD-OA) 5.0. Bielefeld
University. https://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2961544
Crossref (2023). Crossref title list. http://ftp.crossref.org/titlelist/titleFile.csv
Scopus (2023). Scopus source title list.
https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/excel_doc/0015/91122/extlistMarch2023.xlsx
Khanna, S., Ball, J., Alperin, J. P., & Willinsky, J. (2022). Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in avast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies, 3 (4): 912–930. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228
Khanna, S., Raoni, J., Smecher, A., Alperin, J., Ball, J., Willinsky, J. (2022). Details of publications using software by thePublic Knowledge Project. Harvard Dataverse. Version 3 https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OCZNVY
TSV (2023). Listing of publication outlets included in the publication indicatorhttp://www.tsv.ﬁ/julkaisufoorumi/kokonaisluettelo.php