Abstract
Over the past several decades the state in Latin America has gotten increasingly involved in setting the standards for higher education through its governmental scientific councils and institutes. This has meant that universities are increasingly evaluated according to the academic credentials of their faculties. This has been accompanied by a push for the majority of faculty to hold Ph.D.s and for faculty members to be evaluated by their scholarly output, often by the number of articles they publish in scholarly, indexed journals.
Institutions in Mexico and Brazil have led the way in creating regional information systems on the journals published in or on Latin America and the Caribbean, including in establishing the criteria for being considered an indexed journal. The two largest of these are the Latindex (ĺndice Latinoamericano de Publicaciones Científicas Seriadas), an initiative of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), founded by the Fundación de Apoyo a la Investigación del Estado de São Paulo and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico. From their national origins, they have evolved into international networks composed of governmental scientific councils, universities, and other related institutions that have joined together to enhance the quality of scholarly production and the globalization of knowledge.
The Latindex includes the largest number of both listed (23,984) and indexed (8,295 total of which 2,874 are in the social sciences) journals. An indexed journal (de catálogo) must meet 25 of 33 criteria, including 8 basic ones. 1 The use of referees external to the institution publishing the journal is optional, and therefore not all would qualify as refereed journals in North American academe; nonetheless, a good number meet all 33 criteria, including that two-thirds of the members of the editorial board be external to the institution.
The SciELO includes only open-access journals (1,242 indexed, 261 in the applied social sciences), which are peer-reviewed (with at least 20 percent of reviewers from outside the journal’s country of publication). Also, it hosts the SciELO Citation Index, which is used to rank its journals; this index draws upon the data bases of Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Metrics.
Ecuador, through its Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencias, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT), is a member of the Latindex but not of the SciELO. Under the administration of president Rafael Correa, the SENESCYT has set what appear to be even higher formal standards than other Latin American countries of what it means to publish internationally in indexed journals. 2 Its gold standard is a combination of Journal Citation Reports (JCR), based on the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science (owned by Thomson-Reuters), and the SCImago journal rankings based on the Scopus data set of Elsevier. For example, to achieve the top category of remuneration as a full professor (investigador principal, categoría 4), the scholar must have published 20 articles in international, indexed journals, of which 5 must be in journals ranked level 1. Level 1 journals include only those ranked in the top half of the journals in the appropriate specialization of either the JCR or SCImago rankings.
In effect, the remuneration and promotion criteria require scholars to publish in English. Consider the following data for 2014: Of the 3,208 journals listed in the SSCI, only 56 are published in Latin America, 3 and less than half of these are what would typically be considered core social science journals (in anthropology, economics, geography, history, development and planning, political science, and sociology), with the remainder being in psychology, the health sciences, business, law and other fields. These 25 core social science journals are published in only six Latin America countries, in rank order Mexico (9), Brazil (6), Chile (6), Colombia (2), Argentina (1), and Venezuela (1).
Scopus abstracts some 5,000 peer-reviewed journals worldwide and has broader Latin American coverage. 4 In the category of sociology and political science, it includes 928 journals, of which 30 are published in Latin America. In the 2014 SCImago Journal Ranking, of these 30 only 2 are ranked in the top half of journals in these disciplines. The discipline of history includes 897 journals, of which 27 are published in Latin America. Of these, 7 are ranked in the top half. The field of development includes 188 journals, of which 5 are published in Latin America; none these are ranked in the top half.
My search yielded no journals published in Ecuador in either the JCR or SCImago rankings, although according to the Latindex there are 486 journals published in this country of which 99 are indexed journals. In effect, the SENESCYT criteria require scholars in Ecuador to publish in non-Ecuadorian journals. Given the relatively small number of journals in the social sciences that are published in Spanish and included in either data base, these criteria essentially require Ecuadorian scholars to publish in English.
While I have not reviewed the criteria of the governmental scientific councils of other Latin American countries, my impression from conversations with LASA colleagues is that the tendency among universities in the region is increasingly to place greater weight in faculty evaluations on publications in English and/or in journals ranked in the JCR or SCImago. These trends have a number of implications for the field of Latin American studies.
The clear winners are Latin Americanists in the English-speaking world, who benefit both from the efforts of Latin American scholars to publish in English and from the greater accessibility provided to their writings in Spanish through the regional indexing services. But this greater international access to Latin American social sciences comes at some cost—to begin with, the cost of translating and editing papers written in Spanish. Few of the English-language journals ranked in the JCR or SCImago accept submissions in Spanish. The exceptions are the journals specializing in Latin America published in North America or the United Kingdom. 5 A number of these, such as the Latin American Research Review, publish in the language of submission, English, Spanish, or Portuguese; Latin American Perspectives is unique for assuming the costs of translation into English of all articles accepted for publication. While there is professional benefit to Latin American authors from publishing in English, there is the additional drawback that they might up end up with an excellent article that is not accessible to their national audience or useful for their own teaching purposes.
Moreover, policies to encourage publication in international, peer-reviewed journals may come at the cost of national journals, particularly in the smaller countries of the region, such as Ecuador, whose journals are not in the SSCI or Scopus. The emphasis on publishing in international indexed journals may also have a dampening effect on the role of national journals in internal policy debates. Given the interest in the Correa administration’s policies, much of this debate is currently being conducted in journals published outside the country, likely out of the reach of most Ecuadorian policy makers, not to mention civil society. This raises the question of what it would take to have leading national journals—those already indexed in Latinex, for example—included in the SSCI or Scopus data bases or at least the SciELO and why the Ecuadorian government has not supported their inclusion.
Ecuador may currently be the exception to another problem traditionally faced by scholars in the smaller Latin American countries, a problem North American scholars specializing in these countries face as well—the lack of interest of English-language journals (other than Latin American studies journals) in publishing articles that focus on just one country and, specifically, on a country other than Mexico or Brazil or the current “hot spots” in foreign policy.
Another concern is whether policies that favor publishing in international indexed journals come at the cost of other media, such as books. Latin America has traditionally had a number of excellent publishing houses, and much of the impact of the Latin American social sciences on Latin American studies has been through books (recall dependency theory, for example). Under the SENESCYT criteria, being an author or coauthor of a book published by an internationally recognized press is considered the equivalent of one article published in a journal ranked in the JCR or the SCImago rankings. A recognized press is defined as one based on peer review and associated with an institution other than the one by which the scholar is employed. This incentive structure would seem designed to bring about the demise of some of the country’s excellent university presses. 6
What do these trends imply in terms of the research agenda? Most of the U.S.- or UK- based Latin American studies journals have international editorial boards on which Latin American scholars are well represented, but little information is available on the composition of the external referees who, along with the editors, have the final say in whether an article is judged to merit publication. It is probably unusual for non–Latin American studies journals to include referees from Latin America, with the exception of special issues on Latin America or thematic issues that include submissions from the region. My hunch is that the Latin American scholars most likely to participate as external referees are those who are located or have studied in the United States or the United Kingdom and are also the most likely to have previously published in these journals.
A welcome aspect of the growth of the Latin American–based indexing services (which is also one of the motivations for them) is that by increasing access for Latin Americanists worldwide to the scholarly production of Latin American writers, this enhanced flow of knowledge will impact the international research agenda in a more inclusive manner. This might provide a counterbalance in subsequent years to the emphasis on publishing in English-language refereed journals, but much depends on the incentive structures set in place by national scientific institutions and individual universities.