Las revistas universitarias en el marco de los criterios de evaluación de la actividad investigadora en España

Abstract

The evaluation of scientific performance in Spain through the "national accreditation" system and the sexennials (a research assessment program that evaluates academic staff every six years) does not only confer social and personal recognition to professors and researchers, but it also has an influence over their future academic careers. This is a controversial issue where the greatest criticism centers on academic journals and how they are evaluated. Within academic journals, university journals are those considered to be the most disadvantaged. In this article we explore the state of Spanish academic journals from the perspective of how evaluation criteria are applied by different agencies, using several indicators: regularity, periodicity, peer review, their presence in journal impact indexes, and their position in various journal assessment systems. Our results have detected significant deficiencies, but although there are some differences when comparing university and non-university journals, they are not significant. These conclusions can be of interest for evaluation agencies in order to consider rectifying criteria that currently penalize university publishing directly or indirectly.