What's in a name? Scholarly journal title changes and the quest for international visibility (1965–2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scholarly journals have been de‐nationalizing and anglicizing their names for the past six decades in order to gain international visibility and facilitate their indexation in major international databases. Using the Web of Science, we analyzed the historical evolution of this trend and its geography, showing that it has been particularly concentrated in a few countries at different periods of time. Then, we evaluated how title changes have affected the evolution of the journals' language of publication, authorship, readership, and impact. The acceleration of the trend toward the de‐nationalization and anglicization of journal titles coincided with the rise of discourses on internationalization in the 1980s and the growing use, a decade later, of quantitative indicators in research evaluation, above all the impact factor. In general, this rebranding strategy of scholarly journals resulted in a higher visibility in the global market of scientific publications, leading to a more internationalized authorship and readership, but to the detriment of the use of national languages.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.109 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".