The Assessment of Scientific Production Under Debate

Abstract

The year 2021 has brought several novelties in the products used to evaluate the quality of academic journals and, by transitivity, the scientific production of researchers because a great weight continues to be given to journal metrics as opposed to metrics based on articles. There are many voices at the international level calling for a change in this regard and demanding a move away from impact indices. However, the reality is that we are still very much tied to this type of indicator. From the journal Education in the Knowledge Society (EKS), we support and join any serious initiative that advances in a better and fairer evaluation of the production of researchers. In this sense, our strategy is oriented in two directions. First, we will continue working to ensure that the journal is positioned in the primary databases with international recognition, taking care of the peer review processes to guarantee the quality of the accepted papers. On the other hand, we will disseminate the published articles more visible. We will do everything possible to make their citation data clear because we have detected that the formal quality of the citations influences whether the citations received can be attributed to article-level metrics. As far as EKS is concerned, in 2021, volume 22 was closed with 26 published articles. In the international context, the first SJR index (Scopus) corresponding to 2020 (Q3) was achieved and in CiteScore (Scopus), the journal went from a 27th percentile (Q3) in the 2019 edition to an 81st percentile (Q1) in the 2020 edition. For its part in Web of Science, with the publication of the new Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), EKS is located in a second quartile (Q2) in the four years for which this indicator has been calculated (2017-2020). In the list of the 100 journals in Spanish in Google Scholar, the journal appears in position 46. Finally, in the national panorama, EKS has obtained in 2021 the FECYT Seal of Editorial and Scientific Quality, and in the ranking of Humanities and Social Sciences Journals with FECYT seal, it occupies a second quartile. In Dialnet Metrics, EKS is ranked in the first quartile. The content of this article is in both Spanish and English.