Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper presents a descriptive analysis of SCOPUS’ and Web of Science’s journal lists, in order to illustrate and critically assess the current presence of Latin American journals included in these mainstream databases and their working languages for publication. The latest lists of journals released by both databases as of March 2020 were analyzed in terms of journal language and country of publication. Results show Brazil clearly emerges as the regional leader, especially in WoS’ Science Citation Index Expanded and Emerging Sources Citation Index. However, this predominance of Brazilian journals does not entail a corresponding relevance of the Portuguese language. Spanish is the predominant language in mainstream Latin American journals, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities, while journals identified as multilingual tend to associate either Spanish or Portuguese with English. The combination of Spanish and Portuguese is significantly smaller. This calls for a critical revision of the state of the Latin American scientific-editorial field as a linguistic market, as well as for further questioning the role of English as the lingua franca of academia.
Highlights
Within social studies of science and technology, there is consensus around the fact that global geopolitical conditions can strongly influence the state and development of local, national, and regional scientific fields (BENNETT, 2014b)
The inclusion of Catalan and Croatian in Web of Science (WoS)’ top ten languages can be attributed to the indexing of a considerable number of journals published in these languages in Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), where journals are included while being considered for Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), SCCI and/or Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)
This study reveals that, even within Latin American journals inserted in the mainstream publication/ consecration circuit, English appears as a complement to Spanish and Portuguese, but not yet reaching the level of penetration reported in other linguistic and regional contexts (AMMON, 2012; SALÖ, 2015; SOLOVOVA et al, 2018)
Summary
Within social studies of science and technology, there is consensus around the fact that global geopolitical conditions can strongly influence (if not determine) the state and development of local, national, and regional scientific fields (BENNETT, 2014b). Power relations which crisscross scientific fields can be approached from several angles, attending to the geopolitical constraints according to their central, semiperipheral, or peripheral position the within world-system, which has historically been a major concern for Latin American currents of thought (BEIGEL, 2016; KREIMER, 2019) The productivity of these analytical categories derived from world-systems theory (as originally posed by Wallerstein [2004] and further developed by scholars such as de Sousa Santos [1985], Arrighi [1990], or ChaseDunn [1998]) to analyze structural factors of the scientific field worldwide has been asserted by numerous authors (CANAGARAJAH, 2002; BENNETT, 2014b; BEIGEL, 2016; DELVENNE & KREIMER, 2017; CORCORAN et al, 2019; KREIMER, 2019). In spite of clear structural differences among regions and disciplines, the values of the scientific field and what constitutes a successful academic trajectory are becoming increasingly globalized, as the internationalization of sciences turns the field into
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