LATIN AMERICAN JOURNALS AND HEGEMONIC LANGUAGES FOR ACADEMIC PUBLISHING IN SCOPUS AND WEB OF SCIENCE

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a descriptive analysis of SCOPUS’ and Web of Science’s journal lists, in order to illustrate and critically assess the current presence of Latin American journals included in these mainstream databases and their working languages for publication. The latest lists of journals released by both databases as of March 2020 were analyzed in terms of journal language and country of publication. Results show Brazil clearly emerges as the regional leader, especially in WoS’ Science Citation Index Expanded and Emerging Sources Citation Index. However, this predominance of Brazilian journals does not entail a corresponding relevance of the Portuguese language. Spanish is the predominant language in mainstream Latin American journals, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities, while journals identified as multilingual tend to associate either Spanish or Portuguese with English. The combination of Spanish and Portuguese is significantly smaller. This calls for a critical revision of the state of the Latin American scientific-editorial field as a linguistic market, as well as for further questioning the role of English as the lingua franca of academia.