Auditing Social Science and Humanities Journals: The View of an Editor in a Malaysian Research University

Abstract

It is common practice for a university to have many journals located within different schools and faculties in order to help young researchers publish their work and gain confidence in their writing abilities. The focus of this paper is with the journals that are not listed in databases and cater only to academics within a school to serve as an avenue for publication. When the National University of Malaysia was accorded research university status recently, publications and research became an important indicator of the performance of the university. This led to a new demand for publications in indexed journals and for increasing citations. Hence, it was timely to conduct an ‘in-house evaluation’ of journals within the university, focusing particularly on the social sciences and humanities journals. An evaluation was conducted using the basic criteria for journals included in the database Scopus, and measures were then proposed to improve the journals. This exercise was meant to help the journals that had a long publishing history to rise to the challenges of being scholarly journals in an era of competitiveness, databases and indexes.