NWB2023_Why do we still know so little about the total landscape of scholarly journals Leveraging public data for building a common foundation

Despite the scholarly journal publishing space being largely digital today, there is a surprising lack of inclusive indexing of content and content providers. The most commonly used bibliometric databases contain only partial or skewed perspectives on the global landscape of scholarly journals. A large number of journals are currently invisible to most bibliometric research. Change in the space of journal publishing is constant, yet comprehensive knowledge about the dynamics still lacks a lot of scope and depth.

We identify the untapped potential that could be unlocked by having a more comprehensive and inclusive dataset available that could be freely used, edited, and shared among researchers and service providers. To illustrate one potential approach at creating such an initial dataset we identify some public data sources from where information could be drawn and aggregated to create the foundation for a dataset more comprehensive than anything else available so far.

Our preliminary dataset is aggregated from five local and global information sources including a total of 152,644 unique journals matched with bibliographic metadata records from the International ISSN Centre (see table below). Through our ongoing research we hope to spark a discussion in the community about how to move from concept to reality in creating a better data environment for future research in the bibliometrics space.