I think the problem raised by Jean-Claude has to do with the
distinction between "refereed" and "non-refereed" journals:
- One resources for journal numbers is Ulrichs Web
(www.ulrichsweb.com/) which currently lists 25.992 active and
refereed journals from all disciplinary fields. If you are searching
for all active journal (excl. "refereed") the number is 66.493. The
main question is: what is meant by "refereed"? That is not defined by
Ulrichs Web.
- A lot of journals in the humanities and in the some field
of the social sciences have no peer review process in the usual way
(editorial board + external reviews), decisions are rather often made
by one editor or by a small group of editors (without external
reviews). That is also true for a lot journals listed by ERIH or
AERES, in particular for journals from continental europe.
Falk Reckling
-------------------------------------------
Von: American Scientist Open Access Forum im Auftrag von Jean-Claude
Guédon[SMTP:JEAN.CLAUDE.GUEDON_at_UMONTREAL.CA]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 4. August 2009 22:06:48
An: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Betreff: Number of scholarly journals in the world.
In the last few years, various attempts to estimate the number of
journals in the world have been used. Figures ranging from about
14,000 (Michael Mabe) to about 23,000 (Stevan Harnad) have been
regularly brought forth. Few numbers have been used beyond these two
numbers, although they exist.
I have often felt these numbers were much too small.
A new piece of evidence supporting my feeling was recently published
in France: A 721-page list of social science and humanities journals
comprising around 20,000 titles has been compiled. This list is
limited to SSH journals and it relies only on a small number of
sources: Web of Science, Scopus, ERIH and the French list AERES.
Lists such as Redalyc for Latin America have not yet been used. There
are probably long lists of journals to add from India and China, and
other countries. In short, although impressive, this list is still
incomplete and it covers only SHS journals.
The point here is that this list demonstrates the existence of a much
larger set of scholarly and scientific journals than has been used in
our past discussions. This impacts directly on how we evaluate
various approaches to Open Access.
The list can be downloaded at
http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html
I am sure the authors would love receiving further advice and
information to complete their list.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Received on Wed Aug 05 2009 - 10:50:04 BST