Yadira Caballero Quintero
Editora

Colombia currently has 251 registered journals declaring to publish scientific articles in the field of social sciences.

According to the national bibliographic index - IBN-Publindex Colciencias - of all social science journals only 17 were included in 2013 in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank, from statistics of Elsevier's Scopus. From these journals representing 7%, only 3 of them were in the quartile three while none reached the first. Similarly, of the 23 Colombian journals that are indexed in ISI web of science only 9 correspond to social and human sciences; the positioning of such journals as measured by impact indicators categorizes them as journals in quartile three and four.

Things being thus and taking into account the guidelines of Colciencias for 2015, the journalsof social science could not reach the pinnacle of an internal indexing.

By an analysis of the expansion of Latin American journals that are indexed in ISI Web of Science of Thomson Reuters [1], in 2014 it was found that out of the 295 journals included, of all sciences, Brazil won, having the 47% of them. For its part, Colombia ranks fourth with a share of 8%. Our country is surpassed by Mexico with 15% and Chile with 17%. Therefore we can infer that the indexing process of Latin American journals on such global basis has not reached the expected levels of penetration. Which is correlated to the fact that in the said bases the percentage of articles written in Spanish is not representative.

In conclusion, it appears that journals of Latin American countries have low levels of penetration and impact. This can mainly be due to two factors: the majority of journals in the region are young and, in addition, the market favors US and European publications that have higher positioning. It is evident that the challenge is not to enter the indexes, but to achieve levels of higher citation and impact. While it is important that Colombian journals are immersed in international dynamics, lt is time for Colciencias to ask itself : Is the IBN-Publindex necessary today?

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