Making journals more international: Language subject differences and impact performance

Abstract

This study created a comprehensive Country Diversity Score (CDS) index to measure the degree of journal internationality from a diversity perspective, based on publishing authors' affiliation countries. It calculates CDS values and analyses their distribution across countries, publication languages, disciplines, subjects, and journal impact factor (JIF) quartiles for 11,481 journals, and addresses the correlation between CDS and JIF. Empirical studies indicate that journals with authors evenly distributed across more countries are more likely to obtain a higher CDS value. English publications have a relatively high CDS worldwide, and the non-English publications of a country have a lower CDS than its English-language publications. In addition, this study found a positive correlation between journal internationality and JIF in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing authors. Implications and recommendations for improving geographical authorship diversity, particularly in the context of internationalization, are discussed.