Internationalization of Vietnam’s Academic Journals: Readiness and Prospects

Internationalization of academic journals to get indexation from renowned databases such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus has been an emerging trend occurring in developing countries in recent years. In this study, the authors investigated 104 of Vietnam’s academic journals to explore their current state of operation, as well as their internationalization-readiness levels. A new index, the so-called Internationalization Readiness Index (IRI), is introduced to evaluate the level of internationalization readiness of the 104 journals studied. Our results show that only twenty of Vietnam’s academic journals have IRI scores of 7 or higher. The ten journals with the highest IRI scores are journals indexed in international scientific databases or are planning to be indexed in the coming years. Empirical findings provide implications for different stakeholders, including policymakers, higher education institutions and academic journals.