La situación de las revistas a nivel internacional

This chapter presents the historical development of scientific journals at international level. It uses data from Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory and the Web of Science database to analyse the distribution of titles by country, language, topic and publisher. The analysis reveals vast differences between science, technology and health journals, which are published in English by commercial publishers and have a high impact factor, and social and human sciences journals, which are written in local languages and have a low bibliometric impact according to WoS and Scopus indicators, and in which non-commercial publishers play a more important role. Furthermore, the core journal-publishing countries (United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Germany) continue to dominate, but initiatives created by peripheral regions (especially Latin America) and the rising production in emerging countries have changed the landscape in recent years.