International visibility of Armenian domestic journals: the role of scientific diaspora

Globalization is erasing borders in nearly every aspect of human life, and there are few forums more evident of this erasure than the sciences. In this context, the quality, efficiency and responsiveness of research are constantly improving: research results are becoming increasingly available to the professional, amateur and business public, fostering the development of scientific networks and the formation and development of links between science and industry. Meanwhile, barriers still hinder the proliferation of scientific knowledge: language barriers, lack of necessary technologies, absence of links to international scientific databases, etc. The need to publish in journals indexed by international citation databases is another issue relative to the spread and proliferation of scientific knowledge.

Today, the WoS database is globally recognized as a leading dataset of trusted scientific content (Rollins & Yan, 2018). Despite this, there is a lot of criticism relating to the geographic (mainly US-based in the United States) and language coverage (mainly English) of the sources indexed by this database (Aksnes & Siversten, 2019), as the vast majority of national/domestic scientific journals are not covered in this repository. Although some regional and national indexes (e.g., SciELO Citation Index and KCI-Korean Journal Database) have been included in WoS, there is still a disproportionate underrepresentation of national/domestic journals and non-Anglophone journals.

A number of researchers admit the role of the English language as a modern lingua franca in science (Montgomery, 2016; O’Neil, 2018) and there is a constant growth of Anglophone scientific content across disciplines (Kumar et al., 2016; Liu, 2017). However, according to data from UNESCO (UNESCO, 2021), the number of non-English language contributions is also growing. These contributions are published in national/domestic journals and are used predominantly by researchers from the corresponding country to disseminate their research results “internally”, at the risk of remaining unnoticed by the wider scientific community. In a recent article, Pölönen et al. (2020) claim that journals not indexed by the WoS and Scopus databases should also be recognized, as they too can contain many well-researched and scholastically rigorous publications (Demeter, 2017; Sasvári et al., 2019). Chavarro et al. (2017) discuss how this approach impacts scholarship produced in low and middle-income countries and hinders the development of locally-oriented scholarship—which often goes unpublished in mainstream journals. Furthermore, as addressed by Solana and Liberatore (2018), very few domestic journals have international visibility; a domestic journal’s visibility is often solely determined by citations from sources indexed by international citation databases. As a solution to these two competing approaches, Sivertsen (2018) offers an approach of balanced multilingualism that combines the internationalization of research with support for scholarship that addresses issues of unique importance in a local context. Noting that science needs to communicate with societies where different languages are spoken and written, Sivertsen claims that “science needs to be multilingual.”

According to Moed et al. (2021), national journals are defined as periodical publications which are produced locally – in which the publisher, editor, reviewer, authors and readers all live in the same location – and address a topic of local/regional interest in the local language of a particular country or region. The authors note that national journals lack some of the necessary characteristics of scholarly communication at times, which may warrant bibliometric/scientometric research.

Traditionally, the notion of diaspora was connected with the forced removal of certain national, ethnic, cultural, and religious communities from their homelands and their dispersion to host states throughout the world (Walaszek, 2001). This concept was further expanded to include communities and clusters of migrants within host states that formed as a result of voluntary migration (Brubaker, 2005; Vertovec, 2006). In this case, the motivations for migration and the development of a diasporic community are varied, from economic to political, to even scientific ones.

In contemporary context of the term “diaspora,” links with the homeland (or kin state) are often mentioned (Cohen, 2008; Scheffer, 1986; Werbner, 2022). While the development of a diaspora consciousness (Vertovec, 1997) creates an imagined transnational community (Redclift, 2017) connected by ties of moral co-responsibility (Werbner 2022).

In the contemporary era, the Armenian diaspora is considered as an archetypal, prototypical, ideal, traditional and classical diaspora (Nieczuja-Ostrowski & Rafał Raczyński, 2020). As pointed out by Paweł Nieczuja-Ostrowski and Rafał Raczyński, diasporality (i.e., the fact that the majority of a nation’s representatives live abroad) is one of the defining characteristics of the Armenian nation. The emergence of the Armenian diaspora was connected with a set of voluntary and compulsory emigrations of Armenians throughout several centuries: the Armenian Genocide constituting the catalyst of these diasporic movements. The next big wave of emigration from Armenia, following the Armenian Genocide, was connected with the collapse of the USSR and the deep economic crisis that ensued. This wave of migration further expanded the geographical distribution of the Armenian diaspora.

Scientific diasporas, sometimes referred to as “intellectual diaspora networks,” “diaspora knowledge networks,” or “expatriate knowledge networks” (Brown, 2002; Meyer & Wattiaux, 2006; Séguin et al., 2006) are defined as “self-organized communities of expatriate scientists and engineers working to develop their home country or region, mainly in science, technology, and education” (Barré et al., 2003). The above definitions imply that scientific diasporas are in some ways beneficial to their respective homelands.

Scholarly publications can be used to estimate the impact of scientific diaspora in terms of productivity and scientific collaboration (Anand et al., 2009; Basu, 2014; Marmolejo-Leyva et al., 2015). These publications can also be used to analyze the economic impact of brain drain, as well as possible opportunities to increase the economic potential of the home nation (Barré et al., 2003; Meyer, 2001; Rabinowitz & Abramson, 2022; Tejada & Bolay, 2010; Tejada et al., 2013).

Armenia’s scientific diaspora can be understood as consisting of several groups of individuals that developed in “waves” of establishment: the first is formed by second- or third-generation emigrant scientists who grew up and were educated in Western countries. The second “wave” consists of scientists who left their homeland in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, effectively beginning the brain-drain process which continues to the present day. It is estimated that this process resulted in a reduction of the Armenian scientific community by about five times, to the current nearly 3,000 researchers.

The third “wave” of scientific migration is more recent and related to new opportunities involving bilateral and multilateral scientific agreements between the Republic of Armenia and world-leading institutions/organizations.^① A high degree of mobility is one of the defining characteristics of the modern scientific community; a trait which is reflected in the flow and exchange of information and researchers across borders. Several studies demonstrated how academic mobility improves scientific performance, including citations, international co-authorship, and publications of researchers (Aksnes et al., 2013; Fangmeng 2016; Liu et al., 2021).

Generally, scientific migration is considered as a positive factor for the development of science across disciplines. While in most developed countries scientific mobility implies a simultaneous emigration and immigration of researchers in order to preserve intellectual human capital, in Armenia this process was and currently remains one-sided, as Armenian scientists tend to leave their country; often, the most promising young, highly qualified specialists with strong scientific credentials travel abroad for permanent residence, losing professional ties and contacts with their home institutions in the process. Thus, on the one hand, scientific mobility implies a unilateral migration of researchers from Armenia with a negative effect of losing ties with the homeland; on the other hand, scientific mobility facilitates an approach of using scientific diaspora to strengthen the sciences in the homelands. The following sections will attempt to assess the impact of the Armenian scientific diaspora on the strength of contemporary Armenian publications through the citation analysis of domestic Armenian journals.

As of 2023, there are nearly 122 journals published in Armenia from which only six are currently indexed in the international citation databases WoS and Scopus (see overview in Table 1). Although these databases are gradually extending their coverage also to national/domestic journals, their indexing of national/domestic journals remains generally very low.

The remaining 116 titles are national journals—the majority of which publish articles in a range of foreign languages (predominantly Russian and English), in addition to Armenian. We have classified those journals as “multi-language” (Figure 1). The majority of articles in the Armenian domestic journals are, however, in Armenian with abstracts in English (primarily) and Russian (secondarily). All Armenian domestic journals are open access and their content is near-fully accessible on their websites or other open-access repositories.

Figure 1.

It is worth noting that the Armenian language is spoken by relatively few people around the world: it is used near-exclusively within the Republic of Armenia, the Republic of Artsakh and by some Diaspora Armenians, though third or fourth generations of Diaspora Armenians may not read, understand and speak the language.

The focus of this research centers on the 116 Armenian domestic journals which are not indexed by WoS and/or Scopus. The background information regarding these domestic journals was collected from the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring (CSIAM) (http://csiam.sci.am/en/magazines/) and the Supreme Certifying Committee of Armenia (https://bok.am/en/journals). The subject fields of the aforementioned journals are further classified into 15 scientific fields, according to the classifications provided by Glänzel and Schubert (2003).

Clarivate Analytics’ WoS was used to retrieve the citations to the above Armenian domestic journals. The time range of citations and cited documents include 1975-2022. This was accomplished by searching for textual strings corresponding to the names of the official journals as provided on the journals’ websites, their English equivalent and/or translation into another language; in case of an absence of such information, their possible English translation or syntactic technique was indexed, as well as other possible ways of spelling the journal names, their shortened versions and potential abbreviations. For example, the Historical-Philological Journal was searched as “Historical-Philological Journal”, “Պատմաբանասիրական հանդես”, “ՊԲՀ”, “HPHJ”, “Hist.-Phil.”, etc. Different forms of transliteration were also used to be able to search for as many deviations in title form as possible. However, the authors are aware that there may be citations unidentified stemming from failures of indexing due to improper citations or failures to cite articles correctly. Following this indexing, the following data were collected for each of the domestic journals: list of citing articles indexed by WoS, quartile of the corresponding citing journal, and authors of the citing papers.

Then, the focus shifted to the authors of the citing papers in an attempt to find their origin. This was done to identify the share of Diaspora scientists within the citation count. Diaspora scientists are defined as scientists in foreign countries who are of the Armenian origin, those who were born and raised in those countries or moved there from Armenia later. As the Armenians mostly have identifiable surnames ending in “ian” “iants” and sometimes “unts”, they are quite easily detectable. The difficulty here was that some Persian and sometimes Indian surnames were also ending in “ian”, however, those were again easily detectable as non-Armenians, because of their peculiar names and surnames. Moreover, the origins of citing authors were detected through manual web searches and the databases on Diaspora scientists developed by the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring. Once possible Armenian citing authors were identified, they manually checked their affiliations and other information available online (first/second name, CV, etc.). In this way, we were able to identify the percentage of citing authors who have Armenian origin or ancestry.

After identifying the citations and the citing authors, we analyzed the results based on the language of journals and articles, subject fields of the journals, countries of publishers and citing authors, etc.

Despite English being the lingua franca of the scientific world, a wide array of scientific knowledge is still being produced and published in other languages. Additionally, these English-language publications are further limited to journals indexed in the WoS and/or Scopus databases, which include a very limited number of journals in local or national languages. Meanwhile, these non-English domestic journals struggle to proliferate in a globally oriented, competitive world and take their place as a ubiquitous medium of disseminating scientific knowledge. One possible reason for this is that articles in these journals have a low probability of being cited; this may be due to a researcher’s unfamiliarity with or proficiency in the national/domestic language of publication. This lack of visibility may deter the authors from further monitoring the accuracy of the information in those work or their sources. Another concern is the unsubstantiated perception about the low quality of those journals; these concerns seem to be particularly acute for languages that are spoken by a small number of people.

To find out more about the role and possible effect of domestic journals on the pool of general knowledge in circulation in both a local and global context, this article has studied the citations to Armenian domestic journals in the WoS. The Republic of Armenia has a population of only 2.9 million people, while the number of Armenians living abroad—in the Armenian Diaspora—amounts to approximately 10 million. Although not everyone in the Armenian Diaspora speaks or understands Armenian, it is safe to argue that a large number of diasporans may do so. Taking this into consideration, the articles also analyzed the share of “diaspora scientists” in those citation counts.

Having analyzed 122 Armenian journals, of which only six are currently indexed in the international citation databases WoS or Scopus (and were not included in our analysis), we have found that only 47 Armenian domestic journals have at least one citation in the WoS database. Those journals have accumulated 1,697 citations in total, predominantly concentrated in the fields of Biology, Biomedical Research, Bioscience, followed by the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Armenian domestic journals publish articles predominantly in Armenian, but also in Russian and English. Within multilingual domestic journals, the analysis revealed that Russian-language articles have received the majority of citations—followed by English-language and Armenian-language publications. This can be explained by the concept of balanced multilingualism offered by Sivertsen. Here, in the Armenian context, Armenian, Russian and English are necessary for different purposes of communication and are used in different contexts to fulfill specific purposes.

The sources who were citing the Armenian journals were analyzed separately in consideration of the countries/nationalities of the publishers of the journals, citing journals’ quartiles, citing publication type, etc. Findings revealed that the majority of citations to the Armenian domestic journals came from WoS publications authored and/or co-authored by researchers from Armenia. Armenia possesses a large scientific diaspora with connections around the globe; some of these researchers possess ties with Armenia and also speak and/or understand Armenian language.

The problem of the emigration of researchers to more developed countries has been considerably studied (Burns, 2013; Lewin & Zhong, 2013; Meyer & Brown, 1999; Tung, 2008). Demonstrating that this process of “scientific migration” will continue, Alleyne and Solan (2019) argue that developing countries must shift their focus from retention to seeking to benefit from such migration. The research on scientific emigration has consequently shifted from the brain drain to “brain circulation” and knowledge networks that enable the emigrated individuals to somehow contribute to their respective countries (Bonilla et al., 2022).

This current study has demonstrated that diaspora scientists can somehow contribute to the proliferation of knowledge produced in their homeland, as well as help domestic journals gain visibility by circulating and disseminating the knowledge contained in those publications and pave a way for them to be indexed in international scientific databases.

Our findings demonstrate that 202 out of 1,697 citations to Armenian domestic journals are from diaspora researchers—from which 156 are to journals in SSH. Furthermore, among those cited, 119 citations are to Armenian-language publications. Thus, one way of knowledge networking could be the use of publications in domestic languages with an aim of proliferating their results, which could expand our understanding of knowledge networks.