Currently, there are two main factors affecting the internationalization of science: English language and globalization. English became the scientific “lingua franca” after World War II, as Latin was in the past. Globalization is an economic, technological, social and cultural phenomenon that impacts in the ways of generating and sharing knowledge. Scholarly publishing “is constantly receiving more attention in a world that tends to globalization of ideas” (Buela-Casal et al., 2006, p. 1)1.

In scientific publishing, the concept of internationality can be applied to a variety of entities (journals, articles, authors, subjects, countries) and from multiple points of view (from a specific country or region, or from a global perspective). According to Malalana Ureña et al. (2007), internationality may be observed as a phenomenon of two faces: import (collaboration and use of journals from foreign countries) and export (publication of articles by Spanish authors in foreign journals).

Internationality is often mentioned along with quality, mixed with it or absorbed by it. Ortega et al. (1992) considered internationality as a “further indicator of the quality”, and Rodríguez Yunta (2015) included indicators for internationality assessment within a quality system for Spanish journals on SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities).

Quality and internationality are complementary, but different concepts. For example, a domestic journal may publish high quality articles in spite of not having foreign participation or impact outside the country borders. Following this line, Buela-Casal et al. (2006) pointed out that “it should be made clear that internationality per se is not to be equated with quality”. Malalana Ureña et al. (2007) provided a definition that seems to be followed in Spain and other “peripheral” countries – internationality is “something related to the ability that [a journal] has to interest outside the cultural boundaries where it has been conceived”2. It seems that the concept is different in other countries or when it is approached from a different perspective – authors as Kao (2009) and Bonnevie-Nebelong (2013) referred to it as the variety of countries represented and not only as the ability of a journal to impact outside its country.

In late years, internationalization has been a priority. Since the restoration of democracy in 1977, the country pursued the full integration in the European Union and the end of the isolation caused by the Civil War and the dictatorship, that truncated the early development of the Spanish scientific research in the first quarter of the 20th century as led by the Board for the Extension of Studies and Scientific Research (Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas, JAE). The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) substituted JAE in 1939, but real progress did not come until late 50’s with the arrival of the first technocrats to Franco’s government (González Alcaide et al., 2012).

Since 1989, the performance of Spanish researchers and teachers is assessed by the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI), which introduced internationality as a priority criteria (Jiménez-Contreras et al., 2003). First, only articles in journals indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) qualified for research evaluation (Rey-Rocha & Martín-Sempere, 1999), as well as international subject databases for social sciences and humanities. Over the years, some other aspects as the collaboration with foreign authors, the appearance of foreign members in the editorial boards and the use of English language began to be considered (Ruiz-Pérez et al., 2010).

Nevertheless, the current criteria of the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI, 2014) specifies that “appearing in [international] indexes is a warranty for quality content”, which implies that indexation of a journal in such sources is enough to prove the quality of an article, without the need of further assessment. The National Agency for Evaluation of the Academic Career (ANECA) also mentioned international indexation as a quality criterion for journal articles3. The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT, 2015) went further and stated that, in order to qualify for its seal, at least a 10% of the authors or a 10% of the members of the editorial boards must belong to foreign institutions. This percentage is low, and, as it has been claimed so far, the proportion of foreign experts is usually higher than that of authors.

Some of the best journals on Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) are indexed in international multidisciplinary databases and have achieved recognized bibliometric impact indicators such as Impact Factor (IF) and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR). To balance this, the Spanish academia has been building quality assessment systems, initially for SSH journals only. Some of them include internationality aspects. Among the systems no longer used, the family of products IN-RECS4, IN-RECH5 and IN-RECJ6 identified international citations (those coming from WoS’ databases), DICE7 collected foreign authorships, and RESH8 analyzed advisory councils. Among the systems currently in force, CIRC9 uses indexation in international databases to categorize or classify journals, while MIAR10 uses the same concept but for calculating its own indicator (ICDS, International Secondary Composite Index Broadcasting)11. Note that discontinued systems included Spanish SSH journals and analyzed complex information, while the systems currently in force are comprehensive (cover journals from all over the world on any subject), and use easy-to-process data.

In Spain, attempts to separate degree of internationalization from quality fail to the extent that evaluation agencies assign quality to articles only when they belong to journals indexed in databases or directories with international prestige. According to Rey-Rocha & Martín-Sempere (1999), “this policy implies a tacit recognition that the academic quality of local journals is suspicious. In fact, it is leading some domestic journals to face serious problems, even to be discontinued”.

First studies on Spanish journals’ internationality were carried out during the 90s, and only analyzed indexation of small sets of subject-specific titles in international sources. This is the case of Amat & De la Cueva (1990) on biomedicine, Ortega et al. (1992) on STM, and García Marín & Román-Román (1998) on history.

From the 2000 onwards there was a tendency to use multiple indicators. Gutiérrez Puebla (1999) studied 19 Spanish journals on geography, and introduced analysis of countries’ participation. Delgado López-Cózar et al. (2006a) defined aspects that compose “international representation”: nature of the supporting institution, country of institutional affiliation of editorial team members and authors, bibliographic references cited in the articles, and dissemination in international databases. Buela-Casal et al. (2006) defined a composite qualitative Internationality Index that could reflect global perspective, including value-weighted criteria for language, Internet access, country, publishing norms, indexation in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and other sources, editorial board, Impact Factor, authorship and other aspects. It was also used by Zych & Buela-Casal (2007, 2009 & 2010) and Zych (2009) for assessing internationality of Spanish and Latin American journals on Psychology. In the same line, Malalana Ureña et al. (2007) carried out a complete study on history titles, in which they assessed international dissemination, foreign authorships, and scientific committee members, among other aspects. Malalana Ureña extended this methodology to sets of specific Spanish journals on modern history (2007a), contemporary history (2007b) and medieval history (2007c). Aliaga & Suárez-Rodríguez (2007) and Villalobos-Galvis & Puertas-Campanario (2007) used internationality elements defined by Buela-Casal et al. (2006); the first one, for a study of a single Spanish journal, and the second, to measure the impact of three Latin-American psychology journals in Spain.

Since then, all studies on Spanish journals have considered multiple aspects for assessing internationality, including language, indexation, foreign authorships and editorial team composition, mainly. Thus, Román-Román, Sorli-Rojo & Giménez-Toledo conducted three studies between 2007 and 201012 on Latin American studies, psychology and humanities (Román-Román et al., 2007; Román-Román & Giménez Toledo, 2010; Giménez-Toledo, 2009). They assessed visibility in databases and the Internet (using MIAR’s ICDS indicator), foreign authorships and editorial team composition. The results indicated that journals on Latin American studies and humanities had good levels of internationality, while those on psychology must improve. Sorli-Rojo (2013) carried out a study on Spanish journals on architecture, construction sciences and town planning and analyzed international dissemination (“visibility”), geographical distribution of authors, and foreign members in full editorial teams. Sorli-Rojo complained about the lack of affiliation information in such journals, as well as their deficient international indexation and lack of foreign participation. The same author completed a bibliometric analysis of a specific journal on architecture, observing foreign participation in editorial team and authorships, but this time adding international diversity assessment (Sorli-Rojo & Mochón-Bezares, 2014). Escribà-Sales & Cortiñas-Rovira (2013) analyzed the authorship (foreign participation and international collaboration patterns) of a few top journals on communication.

There have been some attempts to build composite internationality indexes. Amat & De la Cueva (1990) created the Dissemination Index (DI)13, applicable to journals belonging to a specific area – it was calculated as the proportion of articles published in national journals and indexed in international subject databases.

Other indicators based on articles, journals, affiliations and databases have been created, although they have been little used afterwards. This is the case of the International Dissemination Index (IDI) and the Trend to Public Abroad (TPA), by Álvarez-Ossorio et al., (1997), applicable to specific subject areas using articles. Rey-Rocha & Martín-Sempere, (1999) introduced the TPH (Trend to Publish Home), which applied to institutional sectors, and later (2004) created two brand new indexes, the Degree of International Openness (DIO) and the Degree of International Collaboration (DIC).

Rodríguez Yunta (2015) defined a methodology for assessing quality to SSH journals indexed in ISOC database, and created three ad-hoc value-weighted internationality indicators - the Compensated Index of Linguistic Internationality, the Compensated Index of Authorship Internationality, and Dissemination in International Databases. His methodology was previously applied to a number of works on specific subject areas14, and was used to rank journals within them. Later, Rodríguez-Yunta (2016), created four “internationality indicators” based on language and author affiliation. These are calculated from the percentage of articles with specific pre-defined punctuation, and include: not-Iberoamerican language, English language, authors with foreign country affiliation, and authors with affiliation from countries different from the two most frequent ones.

There are some specific studies on internationality of journals on health and medical sciences, and they only analyze indexation. Some of the very few are Abad-García et al. (2015) who examined the presence of health journals in multidisciplinary and biomedical databases, and Jiménez Hernández (2015), who assessed “visibility and dissemination” of titles on nursing.

Summing up, internationalization of research output has been a topic of study in Spain since the 90s. During the 80s, journals began to incorporate foreign languages, especially English, and reached a moderate international dissemination (Ortega et al., 1992). During late 2000s, international indexation has been growing in all subjects, and specially in Scopus (Osca-Lluch et al., 2008).

However, there is no consensus of the improvement of the internationalization process in Spanish journals, as it is difficult to study and quantify. Escribà-Sales & Cortiñas-Rovira (2013) complained about the lack of internationalization of the top Spanish communication journals, since most of the articles were single-signed and international collaborations were mostly performed with Latin American authors only. On the other hand, González Alcaide et al. (2012) reported the increase of the internationally collaborated papers by Spanish authors on science and technology indexed in WoS’ Science Citation Index Expanded, for the period 1980-2007 and specially in the 2000s. That finding points to the evolution of the internationality, but only of the Spanish scientific production, not necessarily of the Spanish journals.

A number of studies focused on internationality degree assessment, since being indexed in prestigious directories and databases does not guarantee quality of the journals or the articles (Gutiérrez Puebla, 1999). These studies, described above, have analyzed a variety of elements (separately or jointly) for different periods of time and in journals from specific disciplines or areas, not globally. As internationality cannot be measured by an isolated element or indicator, those indexes (DI, IDI, TPA, TPH, DIO, DIC) were created, but none of them were neither adopted by other researchers nor further developed.

Most works focus on journal sets from specific disciplines or subject areas, with particular ad hoc methodologies, and intend to classify, categorize or rank journals. No studies analyze universal populations of journals or try to discover the relationships among existing elements, how these elements behave, and why.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, later Web of Science and currently Clarivate Analytics) and Medline played an important role by considering internationality as an important selection criteria for journals to be indexed in their databases (Ruiz-Pérez & Jiménez-Contreras, 2006, and Delgado López-Cózar et al., 2006b).

Nevertheless, the inclusion of a journal in such databases does not imply “global” internationality. For instance, the Latin American community seems to be more sensitive to world representation than Anglo-Saxon ones. Redalyc’s internationalization index15 considers foreign authors and foreign countries, while Scimago Journal Rank only collects international collaboration data as the “document ratio whose affiliation includes more than one country address”16.

The scholars in USA, UK, Canada, etc. seem to assume that their journals are already international when perhaps they are not so. According to Malalana Ureña (2007a) and Gutiérrez Puebla (1999), their editorial boards and advisory councils are not multinational, topics treated are approached from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, authors are mostly Anglo-Saxon, and bibliography is Anglo-Saxon. Therefore, these journals are Anglo-Saxon, but not necessarily international. These criticisms usually come more frequently from SSH scholars (these two authors are researchers on history and geography, respectively) than from STM scholars, and obviously from non-Anglo-Saxon communities.

There are not many studies on internationality of British or American journals, perhaps because it is (wrongly) understood that those are already international, or because there is no need to wonder whether they are international or not. For example, Torrado-Morales & Giménez-Toledo (2012) found that only 13% of the authors in 16 British journals on film studies were from non-Anglo-Saxon countries.

Global studies or studies on other regions analyze similar elements to those seen so far. Zitt & Bassecoulard (1998) designed a complex methodology based on the distribution of journals’ authors and quotes across countries, compared with the average profile of specific subject areas. In particular, they analyzed earth & space sciences and applied biology journals indexed in SCI. Their findings revealed that internationality in authorship and citations were strongly linked, while internationality as measured by indexation in databases and journal impact were only moderately associated. They added that assessment within the established indexes would lead to extreme statements, since, for instance, “even a journal with 100% U.S. authors is strongly international because of the high position of the U.S. in world science”. Because of this, diversity of countries, as opposite to concentration, should be further considered.

Studies on journals’ internationality, both at national or international level, usually take only a limited number of journals on a specific subject area. Works by Gazni (2015) and Gazni & Ghaseminik (2016), who collected data from thousands of journals in any subject area and from any region, are an exception. They discovered that foreign authorship depended on the region of publication and on the subject areas (STM beating SSH areas), and that titles indexed in WoS were growing international over time (“globalized”, according to the authors). They also analyzed the “nationality” of bibliographic references, with similar results.

As in Spain, there are some systems for internationality assessment of SSH journals, both at national and international levels. Listes de revues SHS de l’AERES in France17 is an example of the first type, and ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences) of the second. Román-Román & Giménez-Toledo (2010) described the three categories (A, B and C) that ERIH had – international journals could be categorized A or B, depending on a series of concepts and including foreign participation in authorship and advisory council, dissemination and citations received. Currently, ERIH Plus analyzes authorship internationality of the journals applying for inclusion, and requires that at least 1/3 of the authors (not papers) from the last 2 volumes should be from countries different to the publisher18. If this requirement is satisfied, the journal is “international”; if it is not, the journal is classified as “national”, or even “local” when more than 2/3 of the authors belong to the same institution.

In this section, an analysis of the distribution of internationality elements across subject areas is presented (Q1, Figure 2).

Differences are remarkable with regard to English language. It is much more present in STM fields (44%) than in SSH (27%), considering that the average for mathematics & physics (87%) doubles the global average (35%). The rest of the least representative areas (life sciences, experimental sciences and engineering) have between 50% and 60%, while the most populated (A&H, social sciences and health sciences) range from 23% to 35%.

Similarly to the English language, less populated fields have greater proportions of internationality, this time measured as a percentage of foreign-authored articles. Thus, life sciences, experimental sciences, engineering and mathematics & physics range from 51% to 63%, while arts & humanities, social sciences and health sciences remain between 28% and 36%.

International collaborations follow similar behavior in the least populated areas (those with higher averages of English language and foreign articles), but not in the rest. The proportion of such collaborations within foreign articles depends on journal categories - there are remarkable differences among subject areas. Near the half of all foreign-authored articles in life and experimental sciences is signed internationally; however this only accounts for the 7% when it comes to journals on arts & humanities. González Alcaide et al. (2012) found that 40% of articles in Spanish journals indexed in SCI Expanded (WoS) were internationally signed, with a variation oscillating from 33% to 60% depending on the subject. Although, as mentioned before, that study refers to papers and not to journals, it matches our findings to some extent.

The highest averages of foreign members in full editorial teams appear in engineering and mathematics & physics, although those areas represent only 7.4% of all the journals. Arts & humanities and social sciences, which account for great part of the population (18% and 34.8%, respectively), reach this time good levels of internationality (37.5% and 33.9%, respectively).

Kruskal-Wallis H test (Appendix B) indicates that subject area variable is dependent on all internationality elements, or, what is the same, distribution of subject area is associated with all of them.

This section studies the influence of publishers in internationality (Q2, Figure 3). As to publisher types and languages, differences are smoother. Commercial type has the highest average (45%), while the rest lag behind (29% - 33%)29.

Journals published by universities and research centers have the highest average for both foreign-authored articles and international collaborations, but all averages are close to the mean value. The type of publisher does not seem to influence much on these internationality elements, only the few journals published by the government are notably low. Also, the proportion of international collaborations within foreign articles (Appendix A) is balanced among all types (23% to 26%).

As to the presence of foreign experts, academic type is again leading the average (37%). Commercial and private non-profit publishers follow (30%), and government publications lag much behind (16%).

Kruskal-Wallis H test (Appendix B) confirms that foreign-authored articles and foreign experts are associated with publisher types, but English language and international collaborations are independent.

The differences of internationality elements within access types correspond to Q3 and Figure 4 (see also Appendix A).

Hybrid journals have the highest average for every international indicator: 82% of articles available in English, 62% of articles signed by at least one foreign author, 20% of international collaborations, and 33% of foreign experts in the editorial teams. The rest of access types behave very similarly among all elements, except free access journals charging APCs, with better averages for English language and foreign-authored articles. Embargo and restricted-access journals are especially deficient in international collaboration.

With regard to Kruskal-Wallis H test, the results are the same as for subject area: distribution of the values is dependent of all internationality elements.

Table III shows a significant and positive correlation between internationality elements and impact indicators, which occurs in most cases but to different extents. There is a clear pattern – foreign experts’ correlation is close to zero, foreign-authored articles’ is still positive but weak, and English language and international collaborations correlate moderately. It is also of interest to notice that Scopus’ indicators retrieve higher correlation values than IF.

This section develops Q5, on the relationships among internationality elements. The main ones (English language, foreign-authored articles and foreign experts) have very similar averages, ranging between 32.2% and 35.3% and amounting to the 34.0% (Figure 5, Appendix A). When adding international collaborations, total average decreases to 27.6%.

Nevertheless, these data are not meaningful alone and per se. Global averages have to be observed under the light of the relationships among them and with other journal indicators. For this reason, Spearman’s correlation has been calculated for every pair of elements (Table IV). All rho values are significant not only at 0.05 level but also at 0.01 (confidence interval: 99%). All elements are positively correlated, but weakly and to different extents.

The highest correlation is that between foreign-authored articles and international collaborations (0.506), because the latter are a subclass of the former. A similar correlation appears between foreign-authored articles and foreign members at editorial teams (0.463). Some could say that the latter may be attracting foreign authors to the journal, but correlation is not very strong and, in any case, does not imply causation. That correlation could be explained by the fact that most editorial boards that try to count on foreign experts do the same with foreign authors. The other two correlations of foreign members (with English language and international collaboration) are close to zero and thus almost non-existing (0.232 and 0.186, respectively).

English language values experiment a moderated correlation with both foreign articles (0.400) and international collaborations (0.445). This means that foreign participation comes often in English.