Globalisation and localisation in management research publishing

As already disclosed to our community, the RAUSP Management Journal has recently been included in the list of the Scopus indexer, which is “the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings” (Scopus, 2019), We are pleased to be part of the Scopus collection now. This achievement can be considered as a stepping stone in the consolidation of our journal globally, and it demonstrates a consistent work in following the best international practices, consistently upgraded and more and more restrictive.

It is also known that the internationalisation span in academic publishing is a critical factor in evaluating the quality of scientific journals. The more international the journal gets, the higher the impact of the journal in the international community.

This means that for a journal to remain as part of an indexer, it is necessary to be constantly working to increase (or at least maintain) the journal’s relevance, regardless of the impact metrics (Scopus H-index, JCR or any other)[¹]. Figure 1 shows data reported by Scopus for the RAUSP Management Journal. We can notice a growing trend in the number of international citations in the period analysed (from 2013 to 2018). In 2018, 41.5 per cent of RAUSP Management Journal citations come from international journals, much more than 4.2 per cent in 2013, before we started our internationalisation process. According to this trend, the international citations will soon outnumber the domestic citations to the journal.

For us (and other Brazilian and emerging countries’ journals) to continue in this positive trend, two actions seem critical. The first one is to demonstrate the relevance of Brazilian research published in RAUSP Management Journal and other Brazilian journals. A premise underlying this strategy regards the extensiveness of the topics addressed in these journals, i.e. how they contribute to the construction of global knowledge. The broader the subjects of the papers, the larger the readership of the articles, which emphasises the relevance of the journal. In this sense, if this premise is correct, there will be a tendency to suppress or significantly diminish articles that deal with local, regional or idiosyncratic subjects, which present less attractiveness to the mainstream journals or, at least, for the scope of international journals. An alternative is the existence of local niche journals that would cope with these specific contexts. The extensive list of regional journals is evidence of this coexistence, especially in Brazil, where higher education institutions are encouraged to have their own journals. In other words, there would be two very different types of research outlets: the international or global larger journals and the local smaller journals.

The second action would be for these journals (Brazilian and maybe emerging countries’ journals) to seek more dissemination within the national academic environment. From Figure 1, we can see that despite the growth of international citations, especially in the past few years, there is a large number of citations coming from domestic journals. The same analysis can be observed in a recent editorial from Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Mendes-da-Silva, 2018), which shows that the larger number of citations come from Brazilian journals indexed in the database collection. Unfortunately, it is quite common to notice that in the articles sent to RAUSP Management Journal, many times, there are no citations to Brazilian journals. Despite the possible debate on the differences in quality between Brazilian and the journals with the highest impact factors in the world, certainly there must be some relevant local research that deserves to be included in the references.

Figure 1.
Evolution of international × domestic citations (percentage)

Regarding this last action, it is evident that the higher the number of Brazilian journals in the database collection, the higher the possibility of increasing the impact of our journals. Therefore, there is room for collective action among Brazilian journals. Although indexing has become a quality threshold of publications – considering that good articles can naturally migrate to international journals – disseminating good practices and joint seminars tend to enhance the change of increasing the number of Brazilian journals in database collections, i.e. a win-win situation for both the domestic authors and journals.

That is, although indexing has become a challenging quality threshold of their publications, as good articles may migrate to international journals, actions such as disseminating good practices and joint seminars tend to increase the chance of increasing the number of Brazilian journals in the database collections, i.e. a win-win situation.

In short, RAUSP Management Journal and other emerging journals in Brazil and from other countries, despite not being the primary target of some authors, can also perform an important role in spreading good quality research, both globally and locally.

Note

• 1.
  There are different metrics used to identify the relevance of a journal, such as the Scopus H-index or the Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Report (JCR). They present distinctive methodologies and different objectives. We will discuss these metrics in a forthcoming editorial.

References

• Mendes-Da-Silva, W. (2018). Mudanças em 2018 e Expectativas para 2019. Revista de Administração Contemporânea, 22, 812-816. Available from https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1982-7849rac2018180315
  » https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1982-7849rac2018180315
• Scopus (2019). Available from https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus
  » https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 July 2019
• Date of issue
  Apr-Jun 2019