Making science international: Chilean journals and communities in the world of science

Abstract

Drawing on the evolution of socio-geographical imaginaries of scholarly journals published in Chile, this article provides a picture of the socio-historical trajectories of internationalization of scholarly journals and communities in that part of the (semi-)periphery of science. In order to break with the presentism of many contemporary discussions, the analysis covers a relatively long period of time, from the end of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twenty-first century. However, based on an inductive analysis of the journals, the article particularly focuses on the rise of nationalist and regionalist orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the intensification of the pressures for internationalization in more recent decades. Building on the findings, the article concludes highlighting key elements and making some general observations on the internationalization processes in the semi-periphery of science.

Keywords

science communication scholarly journals internationalization core-periphery globalization

Introduction

While globalization is studied and debated extensively in a variety of disciplines, relatively little attention has hitherto been directed to the globalization of/in science (c.f. Drori et al., 2003; Fourcade, 2009; Heilbron et al., 2018). Predominant conceptions of science may constitute ‘epistemological obstacles’ to this type of research.¹ The historical development of science is, however, marked by important tensions between different geographical orientations, especially between national and international frames of reference (see Crawford, 1992; Heilbron, 2014; Schofer, 1999; Stichweh, 1996). The expansion of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries strongly relied on a ‘nationalization’ of science. Different national academic systems and different national scientific communities with their own languages (instead of the earlier international lingua franca, Latin) were established. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘internationalization’ often followed the consolidation of national communities. Internationally oriented institutions, such as conferences and associations, were set up to bridge the differences between national academic systems and to facilitate international cooperation.² These institutions allowed for increasing scientific communication across national borders, although much scientific work remained embedded within national communities with their own frames of reference.

In many instances, the impetus towards international science was fueled by national pride, the professional ambitions of leading scientific figures, and governmental policies. Expansion into the international sphere provided scholars with opportunities to consolidate or improve their own positioning (e.g. Kreuder-Sonnen, 2016; Vanderstraeten, 2018). The articulation of the universalist ethos of science also made clear that national communities and national traditions were embedded within broader, global settings. The rise of international science did, however, not replace or eradicate the national sphere (Hollinger, 1990). National disciplinary associations still exist all over the world; many scholarly journals that aim to have global impact still emphasize their national foundations (American Journal of …, Revista Chilena de …, Deutsche Zeitschrift für …, Revue Française de …, and so on). Despite the expansion of international exchanges, and despite the explicitly universalist ambitions of science, the nation-state has remained a principal arena and an important structuring unit of scientific activity (Vanderstraeten and Eykens, 2018).

However, tensions between different geographical orientations have become more pronounced in recent decades. International and transnational projects have expanded to unprecedented scales. New scientometric databases, such as Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, have made it possible to display global networks of collaboration and exchange, and to calculate the visibility of single units (researchers, universities, journals, nations, and so on) within these expanding networks. Although these databases were originally meant for bibliographic studies, they have ‘performative’ effects (Callon, 2010; Espeland and Sauder, 2016). Scholars and administrators all over the world now increasingly make use of international visibility and/or impact as a yardstick with which to assess the quality of national scholarship. Journals, too, have incorporated the global rankings and impact factors of scientometrics into their everyday decision-making practices (Paasi, 2015).

The expansion of these global networks of collaboration and exchange has, in recent decades, been documented by a stream of scientometric studies on co-authorship and citation patterns. Following these studies, globalization processes in the field of research have essentially favoured the already dominant regions of North America and Europe. They have also increased the dependencies of nations in other regions on the dominant centres (for an overview, see Heilbron et al., 2018). At the same time, however, very little is hitherto known about how national communities, and their associations and journals make sense of the pressures for internationalization. Scientometric overviews of unequal distributions do not tell us very much about the ways in which geographical orientations, whether national or international, are established, reinforced and changed.

Given that international relations are not symmetrical and resources are unequally distributed (Wallerstein, 2004), national communities in the periphery or semi-periphery of the world of science may be particularly sensitive to pressures for internationalization. In order to shed light on the tensions between the national level and these globalization forces, it therefore is useful to analyze how national communities in the (semi-)periphery frame their contribution to the world of science. How do they perceive their international environment and how do they respond to the perceived pressures? By directing attention to these questions, we will be able to look more closely into the processes of globalization that gave and give shape to the scientific field.

In this article, we use scholarly journals produced or edited in Chile to analyze the (inter-)nationalist orientations of disciplinary communities. We look at changes in composition and content and compare current internationalization pressures to previous ones. To break with the presentism of many contemporary discussions, we cover a relatively long period of time, from the late-nineteenth until the early-twenty-first century. Our goal, however, is not to present a chronological history. We focus on significant episodes and changes within this time span, and analyze the main elements and tensions that have characterized the major transitions. We, therefore, particularly focus on two periods: the rise of nationalist and regionalist orientations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the intensification of the pressures for internationalization in more recent decades.

The increasing use of English as the lingua franca of international science is an important aspect of this transition. Despite the large number of people who speak or read Spanish, Spanish does not seem capable of competing with English as the international language of science and scholarship. As we shall show, however, the globalization processes entail a variety of other changes, too.

Altogether we are able to provide a nuanced picture of the socio-geographical ‘imaginaries’ that provided and provide orientation to the Chilean scientific communities. Although several features of these imagined communities are the outcome of specific, path-dependent processes, the relatively long time period and the broad range of scientific journals and communities we cover also allow us to draw more general conclusions.

Methods and data

Internationalization depends on a variety of institutions, networks, migration and mobility trends, and so on. Core-periphery differences and asymmetrical relations are often found in analyses of international exchange. Scientometric studies of the geographies of science, for example, show that the global research output is still concentrated in a relatively small number of nations (Leydesdorff and Persson, 2010). Translation flows tend to reproduce, not correct, this unequal distribution. Many more books are translated from English than into English, whereas for all other languages the reverse holds true (De Swaan, 2001). Following Heilbron (2014: 692), about 60% of all book translations worldwide are made from English. Citation and reputation studies display similar results: Research from the core has better chances of being cited and being translated than research from the periphery (e.g. Koch and Vanderstraeten, 2019).

However, these core-periphery differences do not tell us very much about how national communities in the periphery try to come to terms with internationalization pressures. In order to understand the shifting frames of relevance, it is necessary to look for other sources. In our view, scholarly journals constitute a particularly useful source to study the ways in which (inter-)national ambitions resonate within national communities. Journals play key roles in modern disciplines. They not only allow for regular communication between the members of scholarly communities, but also endorse what these communities take to be certified knowledge (Csiszar, 2018). They are gatekeepers and are able to impose particular orientations. In order to be published, (potential) authors have to come to terms with the expectations specified in the journals’ editorial programs (Baldwin, 2015; Bazerman, 1988). Here we use Chilean scholarly journals to trace the evolution and impact of the internationalist ambitions and pressures in this part of the (semi-)periphery of the world of science.

To select the journals for our analysis, we first included the Chilean journals indexed by Web of Science, as this index now epitomizes global visibility and prestige. We examined all issues of the 47 Chilean journals included in WoS’s core collection at the end of 2015. In this article, however, we focus on the journals covering the natural sciences (i.e. those included in Science Citation Index Expanded). The digitally available issues of the journals were downloaded from official websites, while the non-digitized issues were consulted at the National Library of Chile. We searched in each issue for relevant structural features, such as types of articles (translations, literature reviews, news items, and so on), institutional addresses of authors, referencing styles and publication language(s), as well as (more or less explicit) statements about the geographical orientation of the journal and its community within editorials, chronicles or letters to the editor. Alongside our own notes about the structural features and editorial policies of the different journals, our final dataset contained 1529 documents from the journals themselves (such as editorials, letters to the editor, news, and author guidelines). The selected documents displayed considerable variation in length, ranging from some short paragraphs to more than ten pages.

All these documents were analyzed using Atlas.ti. Our analysis departed from an open coding, yet focusing on the journals’ national and international orientations, their internationalist and universalist rhetoric, and their editorial practices. This coding process was further refined and organized into inductively constructed themes that structured the findings section. For the sake of clarity, the Spanish quotations being used here have been translated into English. We make use of journals’ abbreviated names in WoS to cite our primary sources – full references are listed at the bottom of the article.

Our dataset, then, is focused on the journals published or edited in Chile that have achieved international visibility demonstrated by their inclusion in WoS-databases. However, in order to contextualize our findings, we supplemented this material with information from three other sources. First, in light of the relatively long period we cover, we compiled a list of 915 Chilean scholarly journals not included in WoS (many of which no longer exist). This list entails descriptions of the fields of study, publication language(s), editor(s) and so on. Second, we calculated standard scientometric measures for the publications and citations of the Chilean journals that were included in WoS between 1976 and 2015. The quantitative figures used to contextualize our interpretations are derived from these calculations. Finally, we interviewed a group of editors-in-chief of leading Chilean scholarly journals in order to double-check key turning points of the journals. Due to space limitations, here we primarily focus on the features and changes that can be observed in the journals themselves – and that are thus visible to their respective readerships.

It should be added that our empirical material imposed limitations. We analyze scholarly perceptions of relevant socio-geographical horizons from the late nineteenth until the early twenty-first century. But because of space constraints, details about other structural changes that might provide context for the changes in Chilean scholarly journals and their communities will not be accounted for here. At times, we briefly refer to structural changes, such as the shifting power relations in world society, but the focus of our analysis is upon the expectations regarding the relevant setting of scholarly work.

Findings

On the basis of our coding, we divide the following discussion into two periods. Dominant in the first period is the nationalization of scientific communities, both relative to the world of science and the Latin American continent, while central to the second period is the increasing impact of international scientometric databases and their indicators.

Nationalist internationalization

Chile gained political independence in the early nineteenth century. Its first scholarly journals were founded around the mid-nineteenth century by national associations, such as the Sociedad Chilena de Agricultura y Colonización (1838), and national institutions, such as the University of Chile (1842). But journal publishing would only gain momentum in the last decades of the century. Journals such as Boletín de la Sociedad de Agronomía (1869), Revista Médica de Chile (1872), Anales del Instituto de Ingenieros de Santiago (1888), Anales del Museo de Historia Natural (1891), and Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía (1911) reflected the challenges with which the new nation-state was confronted: population health, territorial expansion, economic growth, and so on. Not only did these journals frequently publish papers on these national challenges, but several of them also defined themselves accordingly. Illustrative is the following excerpt from Revista Médica de Chile:

This journal aims at spreading science, assisting professional practice, and promoting public and private hygiene. The journal shall display the health conditions of the country and its public health services. It shall supply statistics of hospitals’ functioning in order to provide a basis to characterize the most common illnesses. This journal shall publish the works of practitioners and enhance their communication. … The journal shall also have a bibliographic section of the most important international venues selected for either their scientific relevance or their practical utility (REV.MED.CHILE, 1872: 2).

In this context, state agencies and scientific associations published several journals covering subjects that could have specific national relevance, such as (bio-)medicine (Revista Médica de Chile, 1872; Revista Dental de Chile, 1918; Revista Chilena de Pediatría, 1930; Boletín del Instituto Bacteriológico de Chile, 1942; Revista Chilena de Neuro-psiquiatría, 1947), engineering (Anales del Instituto de Ingenieros de Santiago, 1888; Minerales, 1946) and agronomy (Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Agricultura, 1869; El Campesino, 1933; Boletín de Sanidad Vegetal, 1941). The universities also published some multidisciplinary periodicals (Anales de la Universidad de Chile, 1842; Scientia, 1934), which became outlets for scholars based in these institutions and for highly internationally oriented disciplines, as astronomy, which lacked their own national journals.³

These early journals gave particular importance to nation-building processes. Many changed their names as to emphasize their national orientation (e.g. Anales del Instituto de Ingenieros de Santiago became Anales del Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile), while others held meetings with and reserved pages for regional branches of professional groups (REV.MED.CHILE, 1882, 1915). Moreover, several journals also engaged with the national territory as their empirical scope. One frequently finds reports of national and international scientific missions on Chilean soil, such as the national expedition to Tarapacá (ANALES.MNCH, 1891), the Belgian Antarctic Expedition (REV.CHIL.HIST.NAT, 1900), or the Argentinean La Uruguay Expedition (REV.CHIL.HIST.NAT, 1904).

Despite their focus on nation-building, these communities and journals did not close themselves off from their international environment. Since their early beginnings, the Chilean journals, especially those covering the natural sciences, perceived themselves as embedded within international, disciplinary communities. Although they aimed primarily at national and regional audiences, they observed their international environment and intended to link their audiences with the mainstream international literature. The journals often contained translations of articles which had previously appeared in European or US journals, notes on international conferences, and annotated international bibliographies. But the main orientation at that time was national. In light of the organization of national public services, for example, Revista Médica de Chile included descriptions of university programs and health services in Europe and the US (REV.MED.CHILE, 1875, 1920). These practices, however, diminished notably during the twentieth century when more and more Chilean and Latin American scholars started to publish research, which they had conducted themselves, and address international debates in these journals. In terms of language, in the late nineteenth century and until the mid-twentieth century, Spanish was omnipresent in the Chilean journals, even if some of them, such as Anales del Museo de Historia Natural (1891), Actes de la Société Scientifique du Chili (1891), and Revista Chilena de Historia Natural (1897), included articles in French, English and German, which were mostly written by European and US scholars working either temporarily or permanently in Latin America.

Some geographical imaginaries were present in the journals. Whereas Europe and the US were depicted as foreign and leading networks, Latin America was seen as a large continent with national communities that shared the same concerns. Scholarship could more easily be shared within this Latin American network. Even more, the continent could provide the geographical basis for strengthening the position of the journals and their communities in the world of science. This continuity between national and regional orientations can be seen in the attention given to Latin American subjects and conferences (e.g. REV.CHIL.HIST.NAT, 1901, 1901a, 1901b), annotated Latin American bibliographies (e.g. REV.MED.CHILE, 1910) and the inclusion of papers authored by Latin American scholars.

The distinction between both international environments would last until the mid-twentieth century. The international political conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century did not have significant impact on the journals’ geographical imaginaries (Wulf, 2013), but the US leadership after WWII marked the beginning of a new era for the journals. The tensions arising from the Cold War worked their way through Latin American politics in the form of different US-led programs. Chile’s academy could increasingly make use of US technical aid under the Truman policy (1947), economic-technical aid of the Alliance for Progress (1961), funds from different private agencies, such as the Ford and the Rockefeller foundations, and so on (Beigel, 2016; Fuenzalida, 1984; Solovey, 2013).

On the basis of ‘modernization theory’ (Germani, 1971; Rostow, 1960), the Chilean government also renewed its nation-building efforts. Scholarly expertise was seen to constitute an important input. Structural innovations, such as the allocation of research funds in 1954, their restructuration along disciplinary lines during the 1950s and 1960s (Fuenzalida, 1984) and the establishment of new international (mostly US) partnerships, put universities at the center of scholarship. This meant for the journals that their links with the nation’s ambitions, now reframed in modernization terms, would be mediated by their attachments to the universities. Several journals would also subscribe to nationalist ambitions by using the language of development and modernization in their editorials (e.g. CHUNGARA, 1972; ESTUD.ATACAMENOS, 1973; INV.MARINAS, 1985; REV.BIOL.MAR.OCEANOG, 1955). Some even depicted themselves as part of the ‘extension services’ of the universities. The following excerpts display the ambitions of these imaginaries:

The articles’ style is quite direct, and it seeks a balance between the technical language of the specialist and plain language. This kind of communication is necessary to reach a broader audience of humanities students and high school teachers, who want to update or deepen some of their knowledge (ALPHA-REV.ARTES.LET, 1986: 5).

[With this journal] the Faculty of Agronomy goes beyond the boundaries of teaching and research activities to present the output of scholarly work and reflection to the whole country. … Communicating what is thought and done in classrooms, laboratories and research centers allows scholars to participate in and contribute to national development with a body of knowledge that would otherwise be wasted (CIENC.INVESTIG.AGRAR, 1974: 5).

Many new journals were established, too.⁴ While the universities became the most important publisher for the natural sciences, this growth also contributed to disciplinary specialization. Several journals developed in parallel with new university-based programs (Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Química, 1949; Comunicaciones del Departamento de Geología, 1960; Investigaciones Marinas, 1970; Revista de Biología Marina, 1948). Several would contribute to consolidating national scholarly communities, with their editorials systematically addressing the importance of local scholarship and of local training programs for scientists, as the following excerpts illustrate:

For some years, our scientific endeavours will be limited by the current state of the biological sciences, especially marine biology, within our country. Here, as well as in most of the Latin American Spanish-speaking countries, biological research is in an early stage, with the scientists’ efforts oriented to organizing the scientific work and creating the material and intellectual conditions to develop this science (REV.BIOL.MAR.OCEANOG, 1948: 3).

The scientific development in the country requires the training of PhDs in the sciences. There is a shared consensus within the Chilean scientific community on the need for organizing fundamental PhD programs in Chilean universities (BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1953: 3).

This focus on the consolidation of national communities was supported by universalist disciplinary orientations. Effectively, journals would adopt mainstream methods and approaches intending to resemble European and (especially) US journals, while addressing national modernization needs. Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Química, for example, reproduced opening statements of the 9th Latin American Conference of Chemistry (1972), which called for a science based on universalistic principles albeit aimed at ‘establishing priorities according to our reality and giving inputs to change it’ (BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1972: 12). This latter trend was far more pronounced within social sciences and humanities journals. In those journals, the scholarly decay of modernization theory in the 1970s, the sharp decrease of US funds, and the emergence of anti-imperialist approaches such as dependency theory and liberation theology, contributed to a new discourse that even depicted Latin America in opposition to Europe and the US.

The regional sphere gained more visibility. Many changes point in that direction: the number of articles by Latin American authors, the attention paid to regional conferences, the foreign editors for special issues, the couplings with Latin American and Pan-American organizations or associations, and so on. Some differences in the geographical imaginaries within the natural sciences are manifest, too. Some journals aimed at regional audiences, for example, by focusing on the Latin-American continent (Investigaciones Marinas, Revista Geológica de Chile), while others established couplings with Pan-American organizations, which even supported new journals such as Cuadernos del Programa Regional de Bioética (1991). Disciplinary cultures clearly interact with the (inter-)national orientations of the journals.

Since the late 1960s, an Anglo-American orientation also gained footing in Chilean communities. As the first bibliometric analyses of Chilean journals show, references to US publications began to replace European ones (Krauskopf and Pessot, 1980; Parada and Hoyl, 1970).⁵ Some journals also increasingly oriented themselves to Anglo-Saxon models. Several editorial changes were introduced, notably the introduction of abstracts in English, the increasing use of peer reviewing, and the requirement of structuring papers according to the Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion format (e.g. ARCH.BIOL.MED.EXP, 1970; CHIL.J.AGR.RES, 1971). These practices would become standard for natural sciences journals during the following two decades, while the increasing number of articles published in English transformed many journals into bilingual venues (e.g. Archivos de Medicina Veterinaria, Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Química, Gayana). But it is only after the rapid diffusion of scientometric databases and indices that these changes would become anchored in broader internationalization imaginaries.

Calculating internationalization

With the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the rapid growth of some economies in Asia and various parts of the Southern Hemisphere, combined with the rapid development of new communication technologies and scientometric instruments, scientific internationalization entered a new phase. Many Chilean journals openly reacted to the new international indexes and databases. Scientometric interests brought about changes in frames of reference, but a number of journals also adapted their publication practices. They aligned their formats, publication language and disciplinary coverage with their relevant international peers, and thus also distanced themselves from their traditional national (and regional) audiences. When inclusion and performance in indexes were used as evaluation mechanisms, the journals had to meet different expectations. Executive Order 40 of the Ministry of Public Education (1988) provides a clear picture:

The Scientific Journals Publishing Fund intends to fund editorial processes of Chilean journals that are part of the mainstream literature. This status is certified by entering international indexes recognized by the Council of Science and Technology (Art. 1).

The omnipresence of these databases altered the journals’ functioning. This new context would encroach on the journals’ rhetorics and practices, and take the place of their nationalist orientation. Whereas international indexation was initially announced by journals’ editorials as a mere indicator of quality and international visibility (e.g. BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1986: 1; REV.MED.CHILE, 1973: 391), it started to serve as key parameter for journals’ self-observation during the last decades of the twentieth century. And this influenced a broad range of other editorial choices.

Although the earliest international indexing of Chilean journals dates from the 1960s and 1970s (WoS included Archivos de Biología y Medicina Experimentales in 1965 and Revista Médica de Chile in 1972), the language of scientometrics (impact factor, citations, rejection rates, journal rankings) only began to appear consistently in editorials during the 1980s and 1990s. This was a discursive turn editorially justified by the need to align the journals with ‘international science’. A journal’s worth would relate to the number of citations its papers receive (e.g. BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1981).

This turn, however, was not exempt from controversies. The tensions surfaced across a whole range of issues, like discussions about the return of scholars exiled during the latest dictatorship (1973-1989) (e.g. ARCH.BIOL.MED.EXP, 1991), the content of PhD training programs (e.g. ARCH.BIOL.MED.EXP, 1992; BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1985), and the establishment of international research networks (e.g. BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 1994). This extract shows the problematic transition:

How many of the scholars currently in training would abandon their academic careers to address the country’s needs? How much social sensibility is needed to escape from the evaluation net within which our scholars are trapped and which forces them to pay attention to publication scores rather than to the impact they could have in their own country? Are the evaluation systems and grading projects disconnected from reality while the science administrators continue to focus on the world rather than on their own country? (REV.CHIL.HIST.NAT, 1990:146).

Controversies aside, by the early 1990s English had gained ground as a publication language in natural sciences journals in Chile, triggering a debate about the importance of publishing in Spanish.⁶ Following from this debate, which epitomized the shift in geographical imaginaries of the world of science, many journals changed their names to English ones, emphasizing their international orientation. Some of them became English-only periodicals (e.g. Biological Research in 1992). This shift is also reflected in the publication patterns of the 23 natural sciences journals that had been indexed by WoS by 2015. For example, the proportion of articles in English grew from about one third between 1996 and 2005 to about one half between 2006 and 2015.

These transformations came along with the digital turn, which, in Chile, was marked by the launching of the regional database SciELO in 1998. SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a non-profit, online, open-access scholarly database. This project soon grew in the number of disciplines and countries; it expanded across Latin American countries, and in recent years to Spain, Portugal and South Africa.

State agencies took an active role in the journals’ internationalization by providing technical and financial support for their digitalization. Many journals from a wide range of disciplines saw in the digital, open-access policies of SciELO an opportunity to expand their readerships:

To facilitate the international visibility of selected Chilean scientific journals, the ‘Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica’ enforced the program ‘SciELO Chile’ with a website (www.scielo.cl) including full-text articles published in recent issues. Revista Médica de Chile is the first Chilean medical journal that appears in this website. … We expect that this website will give scholars easy access to our articles (REV.MED.CHILE, 2001: 131–132).

It is with great pleasure that we inform our collaborators that the 21^st issue marks the end of the journal’s first phase. From 2006 onwards, the journal will be published two times per year in both printed and electronic versions. This will be possible thanks to the incorporation of the journal into the SciELO index, which will allow us to expand our readership (ALPHA-REV.ARTES.LET, 2005: 5).

During the early twenty-first century, other regional databases (Latindex Catalog and Redalyc at 2002) emerged, to counter the biased coverage of WoS while increasing regional scholarship’s own visibility (Chavarro, 2017). On the whole, these new regional indexes, alongside Scopus (2004), came to build an ecology of indexes that would gain ground in delimiting, structuring and gatekeeping the regional and global spheres of science. Moreover, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, WoS started to expand its coverage to several non-English journals (Collazo-Reyes, 2014). Aiming to legitimate its global claims and improve its position in the new ecology of indexes, WoS included an increasing number of Chilean journals (as well as other journals from the semi-periphery). This environment changed both the international status of the journals and how the journals perceived themselves. For the journals, the indexes changed from an initial opportunity to gain international visibility to an unavoidable requisite for ensuring submissions and obtaining funding:

Fortunately, the number of psychology journals has grown. However, articles are not easily available. Today, a local journal that reaches only a limited group of readers is worthless. Journals must become international. They have to be included in international databases, and ideally be part of the select group of indexed journals with high impact factor. Accordingly, journals should adopt the international standards of articles, format, periodicity, and so on (TER.PSICOL, 2003: 3).

The number of submissions has grown in recent years because of the increase of research activity and the new requirements of publishing in WoS-indexed journals (ARCH.MED.VET, 2004: 103).

Although lively controversies accompanied these transformations, the new ecology of indexes gained further salience in defining what would constitute relevant spheres of scholarship. Scientometric indicators would rapidly transform into evaluation criteria for universities, journals and scholars across disciplines (CONICYT, 2019). The indicators would not just supply a technical basis for the measurement of global impact; they would also establish an ‘indexes ladder’ from regional to global databases. This hierarchy of internationalization would soon inform the editorial policy of many scholarly journals – first gaining indexation, and then climbing in the ranking. Scientometrics and its observation methods seem ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. Whereas social sciences and humanities journals show important variations in ways of assessing scientometric information (e.g. ATENEA-CONCEPC, 2014; ESTUD.ECON, 2013; REV.CHIL.LIT, 2012; 2013; TER.PSICOL, 2012),⁷ most of natural sciences journals now use scientometric indicators to promote and justify changes in, for example, their language of publication, name, and the selection of their Editor-in-Chief. The following quotations show how the language shift was editorially justified:

Years ago, national pride was conceived in terms of publishing only in the native tongue, but that is contrary to the scientific ideal of a human enterprise without borders. … National pride must be understood nowadays as having the means to serve the international community (BIOL.RES, 1998: 323).

Communications have changed our world so dramatically that we need to adapt BSCHQ [Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Química] to the international scientific community standards. I think it is time to introduce drastic changes to improve the position of our journal in the scientific world. These changes should imply improving its format, adopting English as the only language for publication, including a table of contents with graphic abstracts and finally changing the name of BSCHQ. In fact, its name sounds rather outdated and does not match well with the standards of the scientific papers that are currently published. I sincerely believe that the suggested modifications will lead to a substantial increase, not only in the number of submitted papers but also in the ISI impact factors (BOL.SOC.CHIL.QUIM, 2002: 199).

As of January, we only accept review articles written in English. This is part of our efforts in recent years to contribute to the steady increase of our impact factor (ARCH.MED.VET, 2011: V).

Competing to have ‘the best’ (or most citable) paper is a priority for several journals. To achieve this, they make use of a variety of strategies, such as internationalizing their audiences (by adopting English as a publication language, changing formats in view of indexation requirements, and so on) or pursuing new marketing strategies (i.e. presenting themselves as official representatives of regional networks). Several natural sciences journals use their regional visibility as status marker; as they are often the single (or the highest-ranked) WoS-indexed Latin American periodical in their disciplinary fields, they have little difficulty claiming to ‘represent’ Latin American scholarship. The prestige that goes with WoS indexing, the possibility (in some of them) to publish in Spanish, and the widespread use of performance-based assessments across Latin America, have reinforced their position. According to our analyses, the inclusion of Latin American authors in the WoS-indexed Chilean journals increased dramatically over a recent decade, from one in ten papers (1996-2005) to one in four (2006-2015). This trend is indicative of the particular regional/global entanglement of the natural sciences, and highlights the threats and opportunities, which this new environment entails for the national and regional networks in the semi-periphery of the world of science.

Conclusion

In the nineteenth century, the rise of nation-states created new spaces for scholarship. Different national academic systems were established, and different national scholarly communities organized themselves by means of their own associations, journals and conferences. Even at present, much scientific work is contained within the boundaries of specific nation-states, if only because the labor market, institutional networks and funding structures continue to be predominantly national in most parts of the world. At the same time, however, there is little doubt that science has become more international over the past two centuries. On the foregoing pages, we have tried to make sense of current internationalization pressures by putting them in historical perspective.

Already in the nineteenth century, increasing international collaboration went along with the reinforcement of global intellectual orientations and value systems, like those expressed in the universalist ethos of science. Evidently, however, these universalist ambitions were not part of a self-realizing program, able to transform a plurality of heterogeneous national communities into one unified global system of science. To analyze the structure of this world of science, it is, in our view, not only important to analyze how scholarly communities in the (semi-)periphery are embedded in global scientific networks, but also to examine the ways in which these communities make sense of and respond to the changing expectations in the increasingly global world of science.

On the foregoing pages, we have analyzed the predominant socio-geographical imaginaries of the research communities and their scholarly journals in Chile. Over the last one-and-a-half centuries, these journals identified and targeted different relevant audiences, at national, regional (or continental) and global levels. The relatively sudden transitions that took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century are in important respects elicited by the rapid diffusion of internationally-oriented bibliographic databases and scientometric instruments. Though contested, the numerical representations of the ‘world of science’ produced by WoS and other databases have become widely used as indicators of international visibility or impact. These representations not only enable new forms of knowledge but also make it possible to imagine new modes of interventions; they conceive of scientific communities as a new sort of object, which could be both the target of research and of policy interventions. In important ways, the editorial changes, which many Chilean journals have implemented in the course of the last decades, respond to the presumed requirements for inclusion in WoS and other databases.

We have also shown that internationalization dynamics are entangled with disciplinary distinctions. Although internationalization or globalization seemed evident for the natural sciences, given the fact that their object – ‘nature’ in its different forms – transcends national boundaries, nationalization tendencies were strong during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Nationalization trends were also strong within the humanities and the social sciences until the latter part of the twentieth century. In recent decades, the globalization of these disciplines seems to be more complex and contradictory than that of the natural sciences. Nonetheless, for several disciplines, both continental and global horizons have gained relevance next to local and national frameworks. The establishment of regional databases also seems to reinforce regional/continental orientations.

Our analysis thus shows that globalization processes in science depend on a range of structures and lead to a range of consequences. They depend on the formation and institutionalization of continental and global spheres, and the acceptance of ‘international’ standards to measure national or local accomplishments. They also depend on disciplinary characteristics, including indexation trajectories. As has been seen, internationalization pressures can be translated into a variety of editorial decisions (language of publication, format, disciplinary scope, and so on). Our analysis suggests that internationalization is not synonymous with the gradual extension of scholarly communities and their predominant socio-geographical imaginaries. Nor is it synonymous with the formation of one worldwide scientific community with a shared set of normative and cognitive presuppositions. These processes remain characterized by struggles, conflicts, and confrontations.

Of course, national academic systems may diverge in how they stimulate internationalization. They may adopt different measures and different incentives. Currently, many different national varieties of internationalization policies exist. The internationalization trajectories of the Chilean journals and communities we included in our analysis show some of the consequences of such policies. It would be misleading to draw more general conclusions, although it is reasonable to postulate that other scholarly communities in the semi-periphery are being confronted with similar challenges.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Elizabeth Zenteno and Matias Koch for their assistance during the data-collection phase.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research received funding from CONICYT PFCHA/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2015 – 72160036.

ORCID iD

Tomás Koch

Notes

Author biographies

Tomás Koch is a faculty member of Social Sciences Faculty, Playa Ancha University (Chile) and PhD student at the Center for Social Theory of Ghent University (Belgium). His research interests include scholarly communication, sociology of knowledge and higher education studies. He is also a member of Observatorio de Participación Social y Territorio (Playa Ancha University).

Raf Vanderstraeten is Director of the Center for Social Theory and Member of the Sarton Center for History of Science, both at Ghent University (Belgium). He was in recent years Visiting Professor at the Université de Lille (France), Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Finland), and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago (USA). He is now also Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (England).

Ricardo Ayala is a postdoctoral research fellow financed by Research Foundation Flanders. After a brief career in healthcare in Chile, he studied sociology at Université de Strasbourg (France) and completed his doctoral research at Ghent University (Belgium). His interests include history of science, social theory, and discourse analysis.

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