Editorial boards of global journals
A research journal as a forum for conducting discourses on science systematizes fields of knowledge. While conducting discourses the journal involves very large number of peer reviewers who indeed act as gatekeepers and provide the field of knowledge an emergent structure. Readers of the journal appear only secondarily in this process of discourse.
Countries in the periphery of S&T knowledge publish only a few research journals. More importantly, even fewer number of peer reviewers of the submissions to journals published from the core developed countries are drawn from the peripheries. Only a handful of journals publish such listing of peers. From the few published sources it appeared that almost the entire community of peers resided and worked in proximate geographies within the journal publishing developed countries. Dialogical space remained bounded therefore within the geographies of publishing countries. From the journals, however, we computed country affiliations of the editorial boards and/or editors who significantly influence the discourse. Such influences prove critical in the selection of research problems. In other words journal editors often set the research agenda. The following figure reflects on the distribution of editors.
Publisher |
No. of Journals |
Society Publishers |
299 |
Blackwell Publishing |
93 |
Cambridge Univ |
64 |
Taylor & Francis |
177 |
Wiley |
116 |
Marcel Dekker |
40 |
Academic Press |
104 |
Kluwer |
255 |
Oxford Univ |
74 |
Springer |
299 |
Elsevier |
534 |
Others from Dev. countries |
605 |
8,474 editors and their country affiliations in editorial boards of 2,660 international journals published by several publishers
Fig 1: Country-wise distribution of editors of global journal (2003-04)
Distribution of publications infrastructures greatly varies over countries. We collected data from about more than a thousand global journals and 40% of these appear from USA alone, 16% from UK, 8% from Germany, 6% from Japan, and the developed countries together (excluding Russia and Israel) publish 93% of these journals. Only 1% of these come out from China (however, publishing business houses in recent time have started bringing out more journals from China). India brings out less than 1% of these journals.
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