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Internationalisation in (old) academic publishing: A Case Study in the disciplines of Biochemestry and Molecular Biology

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posted on 2017-10-28, 11:12 authored by Bárbara Rivera-LópezBárbara Rivera-López

International publication spaces are dominated by US and UK-based research (Paasi, 2015). A high output of UK and US-based authors (Gutierrez and Lopez-Nieva, 2001; Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft, 2006; Bański and Ferenc, 2013), a high percentage of US-based editorial members (Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft, 2006) and a domination of English language journals (Paasi, 2015) are an expression of Western-hegemony practices which have created uneven writing spaces. The present research seeks to deepen the hegemony debate by focusing on a new research unit: references. These units create representational designs in the disciplines, and precede all old and new intellectual work and knowledge representation (Cope and Kalantzis, 2014). Through multiple descriptive case studies on 1,040 references of six research and review articles of high impact journals in the disciplines of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (PLoS Biology, Cell, and Reviews of Biochemistry) it was possible to identify, describe and visually represent the spatial patterns of referencing. The main findings support previous literature; 74.9% of the references surveyed had at least one author from either the US or the UK. Moreover, there was a notable predominance of authors from the US (69.9%); and a high preponderance of authors from English speaking countries (88.32%). While, 79.6% of the countries are not referenced, and only 2.2% of the references come from Central and South America, and Africa. As a conclusion, there is a misrepresentation of the concept of international; and marginalisation practices which validate science produced in certain places in the world against others (Aalbers, 2004; Minca, 2013).

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Conicyt, Chile

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