Measuring internationality of regional scientific journals

Publishing in international scientific journals is currently seen as an important criterion for researchers in many matters such as meeting academic promotion criteria, receiving research incentive payments, and finding funding for scientific research projects. There are ambiguities in the definition of "international journal", which is meant by publishing in international journals that have a place in important documents and policies. The use of the concept is perceived as being included in some commercial citation indexes such as Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In order to eliminate the ambiguity in the concept of international journal/local journal, detailed analysis of journals is required. Journals of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), which are also included in the citation indexes, were selected for analysis. The aim of the study is to evaluate the internationality of journals through their author affiliations, the citations they receive, and the structure of their editorial boards. The Index of National Orientation (INO) metric was used as the evaluation criterion. INO is a measure of the percentage of the country most represented in the geographical distribution of authors who have published in a journal. In the study, the research articles (n = 2408) published by a total of 11 journals in the subject areas of natural sciences (9), medicine (1) and engineering (1) between 2020-2022, and the affiliation countries of the citations received by the journals in 2023 (n = 1732) were analyzed using bibliometric techniques. As a result of the study, it was determined that 71.13% of the publications in the journals and 38.86% of the citations received by the journals were made by authors in institutions in Turkey. Although there is a moderate negative correlation between the 5JIF and the INO-C value, this relationship is not significant (r = -,528 p =,095 r2 = 0,278). According to results, Impact Factor is an insufficent metric to reflect the internationality of journals.