Measuring Internationality of Regional Scientific Journals

Publishing in international scientific journals is currenty seen as an importantcriterion for researchers in many matters such as meeting academic promotioncriteria, receiving research incentive payments, and finding funding for scientificresearch projects. There are ambiguities in the definition of "international journal",which is meant by publishing in international journals that have a place in importantdocuments and policies. The use of the concept is perceived as being included insome commercial citation indexes such as Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Inorder to eliminate the ambiguity in the concept of international journal/local journal,detailed analysis of journals is required. Journals of the Scientific and TechnologicalResearch Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), which are also included in the citationindexes, were selected for analysis. The aim of the study is to evaluate theinternationality of journals through their author affiliations, the citations they receive,and the structure of their editorial boards. The Index of National Orientation (INO)metric was used as the evaluation criterion. INO is a measure of the percentage of thecountry most represented in the geographical distribution of authors who havepublished in a journal. In the study, the research articles (n = 2408) published by atotal of 11 journals in the subject areas of natural sciences (9), medicine (1) andengineering (1) between 2020-2022, and the affiliation countries of the citationsreceived by the journals in 2023 (n = 1732) were analyzed using bibliometrictechniques. As a result of the study, it was determined that 71.13% of thepublications in the journals and 38.86% of the citations received by the journals weremade by authors in institutions in Turkey. Although there is a moderate negativecorrelation between the 5JIF and the INO-C value, this relationship is not significant(r = -,528 p =,095 r2 = 0,278). According to results, Impact Factor is an insufficentmetric to reflect the internationality of journals.