Toward a classification of Spanish scholarly journals in social sciences and humanities considering their impact and visibility

The characteristics of the production and dissemination of scientific activity in social sciences and humanities make such endeavours less visible than other areas in international databases. The same circumstances also limit the evaluation of journals, researchers and institutions and complicate the quality-based comparison of scientific-scholarly journals. This study presents a methodology developed in order to classify the Spanish journals of social science and humanities. With the aim of considering national journals in research activity evaluation processes, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) has sponsored and coordinated the development of a classification that allows journals that have obtained the FECYT Quality Seal to be ranked. For this purpose, a model with two dimensions (impact and visibility) based on quantitative criteria has been carried out. To obtain indicators in each of these dimensions, databases such as the Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index from the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, SciELO, Google Metrics and the Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals are used as sources of information. Spanish evaluation agencies have recently announced the implementation of this evaluation methodology in various disciplines.