Radiography of a decade (2011 - 2020) of Spanish educational scientific journals

Abstract

Spanish scientific journals on education have shown an extraordinary evolution in recent decades, which has been consolidated since the 1980s with the exponential growth of these publications. Since the University Reform Law (LRU, 1984), the evaluation of research through published scientific production has become the reference for the professional development of university teaching and research staff, with research merits being measured based on the impact of articles published in indexed scientific journals, mainly in the two international reference databases: Social Science Citation Index and Scopus. This article aims to analyze the evolution of Spanish scientific journals on education based on several indicators: impact and indexing, international collaboration, distribution by year, language, subject, authors' origin, funding, descriptors, and citation.  

Using a descriptive methodology, these indicators are analyzed for the eight indexed Spanish scientific journals only in the 'Education' category by the Scimago Journal Rank of Scopus with permanence from 2011 to 2020. The results show an upward evolution of the impact, measured in citations and the indexation of the journals under study. The increase in international collaboration stands out, especially between Latin American countries, with a more significant presence of articles in English. Regarding the content reflected in keywords, topics such as inclusion, citizenship and coexistence, educational assessment and school results, competencies, teacher training, and educational technology stand out, based on contextualized research mainly in higher and secondary education. On the other hand, there is a high frequency of keywords that are too generic and do not clearly identify the research they represent. These results raise several challenges that Spanish scientific journals in education will face in the immediate future.

Keywords: scholarly publishing; educational research; scientific communication; research visibility; academic productivity, research impact.