Quality, pluralism and prestige of the Spanish Library and Information Science journals

Abstract

In order to obtain data on the degree of scientific development and consolidation of the Library and Information Science discipline in Spain, an analysis of the Spanish scientific journals of Library and Information Science, during a period of ten years (1992-2001), is approached in this paper. Several dimensions related to their quality are considered: a) Degree of fulfilment of the indicators of publishing quality more influential on the quality of contents; b) level of opening or inbreeding of each journal, measured by the editorial council composition and specially by the author’s plurality, with special attention to the foreign authors; c) recognition or prestige of each journal in the scientific or professional community, based upon the ‘expert assessment’.
The analysis shows, among other characteristics, the following: the publishing quality indicators which are more influential on the quality of contents are weakly fulfilled; inbreeding trends are noticed in the academic journals; ‘expert evaluation’, ranking the journals according to their recognition level, ascribes positions of similar rank to the academic and professional journals. All these factors would reveal a limited development of the Spanish Library and Information Science academic research and would confirm the inherent overlapping between research and development in this area of knowledge.