Language and Citation Geography: Structural Barriers to Upward Quartile Mobility Among Ibero-American Health Journals
Keywords:
QuartileAbstract
Ibero-American health science journals indexed in Web of Science or Scopus tend to rank in lower quartiles than their humanities counterparts indexed in the same databases, a counterintuitive pattern given health's greater editorial internationalization. Three explanatory factors are examined: the relative, category-based calculation of quartiles, which favors disciplines with smaller and less saturated fields; the loss of the regional protection that language otherwise provides, since health journals already compete in English without a linguistic buffer against the Anglophone core; and a structural geographic bias, present even in the design of commercial bibliometric databases, that penalizes the region's institutional origin. The quartile disadvantage would therefore not stem from lower editorial quality, but from the overlap of these mechanisms. It is concluded that recognizing this dynamic could guide reforms toward more flexible regional classification models, such as metric imputation schemes, capable of mitigating it.
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