Circulation of Academic Knowledge and Recognition

Abstract

In the last two decades, mainstream journals and university rankings became synonymous with global science because citation indexes and the impact factor “universalised” a particular style of writing, hiding the fact that these databases were highly endogamous. Several studies have observed that the publishing indicators collected by the Institute for Scientific Information, created in 1959 led to the accumulation of centrality and, at the same time, to the marginalisation of the scientific “periphery” (Ortiz, 2009; Guédon, 2011; Gingras, 2016). Eventually, this form of communication didn’t increase cosmopolitanism but rather confined the dialogue among a limited group of journals and to a unique language. Thus, the history of the so-called mainstream circuit is marked by the fact that for almost 50 years, the Science Citation Index (1964) and other tools created by Eugene Garfield in the ISI monopolised the path for the internationalisation of science and boosted the hyper-centrality of English as the most valuable transactional linguistic capital (De Swaan, 2001; Gerhards, 2014).