How to assess journals' internationality in the Humanities and their categorization in ERIH

The internationality of scholarly journals is an important aspect of scientific quality and is considered ever more highly by funders and assessment agencies. But the analysis of different levels of internationality of publications is a complex task, particularly in the Humanities. This paper attempts to make a small contribution toward clarifying some of the methodological difficulties encountered. After a brief review of indicators on journal internationality employed in a number of papers published between 1997 and 2007, the authors selected several that were among the most frequently used and least controversial. The indicators were then applied to Spanish scholarly journals to assess their internationality through the following parameters: internationality of advisory boards, internationality of contributing authors and international visibility. The results obtained in this exercise are presented and in the discussion they are compared with the categorization assigned to the same journals in the ERIH "Initial lists". Possible reasons for the major discrepancies observed are analyzed. The conclusions point to the urgent need to clarify the applied indicators to determine internationality, to expand their number and to assure their objectivity, in order to guarantee the reproducibility of the assessment process and results.