Globalization of national journals: investigating the growth of international authorship

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study investigated changes in the internationality of national publishers' journals for the period 1990–2013. The patterns of foreign and interregional authorship in papers and references of 4,199 journals from 3,529 publishers were analyzed. The results revealed that foreign authorship increased from 36% to 62% during the period, but interregional authorship only grew from 77% to 82%. The growth in internationality is not the same across disciplines and regions of the world. Agricultural sciences, psychiatry/psychology, and economics and business have the least number of foreign authors, while journals in space science, mathematics, and physics have the most. According to the number of both foreign‐authored papers and foreign‐authored citations, clinical medicine is one of the least international fields. Latin America and Middle East publishers have a greater tendency to publish papers from authors in their countries. In contrast, national publishers in North America have become considerably more international over time. Russia, China, and Brazil publish the least number of foreign authored‐papers in their journals, while Switzerland's journals publish the most.