Author:

Keywords:

eographical journals, bibliometry, ranking, open access, International Geographical Union (IGU), Web of Science, SCOPUS, Publish or Perish, 0406 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience, 1604 Human Geography, Geography

Abstract:

Yet more than for other sciences, due to researches coupling local and global, geography suffers from the domination of the “international” Anglo-Saxon literature controlled by the big publishers. On the basis of the collection of 787 geographical journals and the analysis of their rankings, a bias appears to be evident in favour of the journals published in English by the big commercial publishers, not related to the specific quality of the papers. Moreover, another bias is obvious in favour of the specialised topical journals, very often not specifically geographical ones, at the expense of the general geographical and area studies journals. The development of open access journals seems to be an answer of some Latin countries (France, Spain, Brazil, Romania) to this imperialistic challenge. This paper is fully on line with the endeavours of the International Geographical Union (IGU) for promoting a fair, balanced and diversified dissemination of the world geographical research.