National Lists of Academic Journals: An Overview of World Practice

Abstract

The article summarizes global experience in the development of national lists of scholarly journals. We show that some countries are currently transforming their research evaluation institutes, because such systems proved ineffective in the context of geopolitical turbulence. We observe that the focus is shifting from the use of indicators of international scientometric databases to the use of the combination of qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Besides, we note that the importance of national academic journals is increasing. We analyze approaches to the formation of national lists of scientific periodicals and reveal specific features of the procedures for their creation. We put forward a typology of national lists of journals and assess their impact on the publication behavior of researchers. We conclude that global practice provides examples of effective approaches to the compilation of national “white” lists of academic journals, which, due to their integration into the scientific performance evaluation system, act as a kind of stabilizing mechanism that protects the system from the influence of external challenges in times of geopolitical instability. The conclusions we have obtained during the analysis contribute to the development of knowledge in the field of scholarly journals evaluation.