Abstract
Latin American regional journals have adopted measures to increase both their quality and visibility, among which figures the promotion of their inclusion in international databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. An increasing number have recently taken advantage of the support and hosting services offered by Elsevier on the Science Direct (SD) platform, with the expectation of achieving this goal. The present study takes a preliminary look at the tendencies in the coverage in these databases of a sample of open access Latin American journals hosted on SD in June 2016 and their metadata, to typify the most common errors which can affect the use of performance indicators in individual and institutional evaluations and the integration of authors into scholarly reputation systems. A significant level of these errors was found relating to such aspects as journal coverage, duplicate records, reference data and links to full text, in addition to conventions concerning author names and titles that adversely affect retrieval of articles and the correct assignation of author credit and of citations, suggesting that present strategies have yet to deliver the expected results.
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Acknowlegements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions improved the manuscript. Preliminary results of this paper were presented at the International Seminar of Quantitative and Qualitative Studies of Science and Technologies “Prof. Gilberto Sotolongo Aguilar” 2016, Cuba.
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There have been recent significant developments regarding LA OA journal content on the Science Direct platform since this preliminary analysis was performed in 2016. At the beginning of 2018 a group of 44 Mexican journals ceased participating in addition to a few other LA journals. Thirteen of the nineteen journals in our sample no longer have current content hosted on SD. The remaining journals seem to be pursuing a different strategy of having a great deal more of their content on separate society webpages maintained by Elsevier.
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Ainsworth, S., Russell, J.M. Has hosting on science direct improved the visibility of Latin American scholarly journals? A preliminary analysis of data quality. Scientometrics 115, 1463–1484 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2725-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2725-7