What's in a name? Scholarly journal title changes and the quest for international visibility (1965–2020)

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.