Academic research

At the recent National Conference for Quality Assurance in International Journal Publications and Sustainable Research Management of the Philippine Association of Institutions for Research (PAIR) at Our Lady of Fatima University, I talked about the need for our universities to improve the journals they publish.

Because we live in an academic world of learned journals (more than a third of which are now online, by the way), we have to follow the standards required of the 16,000 journals listed by Thomson Reuters ISI or the 18,000 journals listed by Scopus. Otherwise, we will belong to the 25,000 other journals not taken seriously enough by scholars around the world to read them, much less cite them. (Unless we are cited, we will always score embarrassingly low in world university rankings. Even more important, unless we are read, scholars around the world will never get to use or to appreciate our brilliant insights and discoveries.)

What are some of the things both ISI and Scopus look for in a journal?

Timeliness of publication. Our journals have to come out on time. It makes no difference if a journal comes out quarterly or annually. The important thing is that it comes out when we say it will come out.

International editorial conventions. Our journals have to follow international editing practices, including style sheets (APA, Chicago, MLA, and so on), proofreading marks, and intellectual property rules.

English language bibliographic information. Because both ISI and Scopus are English-dominant, journals in other languages have to include English abstracts. One of my current advocacies is to have a Filipino-language journal, Malay, listed by either ISI or Scopus. Malay is already the most widely-read Philippine journal (accounting for 35% of the online readership of Philippine journals in any language, according to Google), but it is still not listed by ISI or Scopus because it was only recently that it published English abstracts.

Editorial content. Journal articles have to offer new findings or insights. They have to develop an argument with enough verifiable data. They have to have abstracts and keywords. Above all, they must never, never have any kind of plagiarized content nor violate any copyright laws. The kind of “cut and paste” mentality of many (if not most) of our students and even teachers has to be stopped.

International diversity of authors and editors. A university journal that features only articles written by faculty members of that university will never be taken seriously by anyone outside that university (and in many cases, not even by those inside the university). A university journal must feature mainly articles by scholars not only outside the university but outside the country. The first step in getting such articles is having an editorial board composed of scholars in major universities (those in the top 200 in the world). This is not hard to do if the editor joins email groups (or even Facebook) or regularly attends conferences abroad. Most foreign scholars agree immediately to being listed in an editorial board, because that adds to their own credentials.

Citation history of journal. To ensure that our journals are cited, they should first be read, and before they are read, they should first be available. In the past, it was extremely expensive to send copies of journals to libraries abroad. Today, with online journal publishing, it costs a university nothing to get its journals on online aggregations such as Philippine E-Journals and Philippine Journals Online (both of which, by the way, I initiated).

Citation history of authors and editors. Once a journal fulfills all of the above requirements, the editor can start being more discriminative. Scholars on the editorial board must be famous, in the sense that they are often cited by other scholars. Authors that submit articles must also have a history of being cited often. It takes very little effort to find out if a person is cited. Just use Google Scholar.

Aside from these guidelines taken from ISI and Scopus, there are other commonsense actions we can take to ensure that we get into the mainstream of international knowledge production.

For example, universities can put a link to Philippine E-Journals or Philippine Journals Online on their websites. (By the way, a university that does not have a website simply does not count.)

Faculty members, not just editors, could email their colleagues outside the country about a journal issue when it comes out. The editor could compose a one-paragraph description that would be easy to forward.

The editor could start a blog about the journal, focusing on the articles in the latest issue. Even easier, editors and contributors could talk about the latest issue in Facebook and other social networks.

We have some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. Just think of Conrado Dayrit, who wrote in The Philippine Journal of Internal Medicine in 1992 about the benefits of virgin coconut oil. Because that journal had a very limited circulation, Dayrit was not credited worldwide with this discovery. Instead foreign researchers writing in Clinical Biochemistry in 2004 are said to be the first in the field.

Universities must step up and join the online world community of learned journals.