Abstract:

The role of periodical publications is important in the communication process, because by publishing their results, researchers disclose their contributions to the community in which they operate. However, current science is increasingly characterized by a growing interdisciplinarity. The greater complexity of the research, with the consequent specialization of the researchers, makes more and more necessary the collaboration between scientists of diverse disciplines to approach problems and situations. This plural approach to research problems is also transferred to its publications, which can be associated with several categories within any classification. Interdisciplinarity does not occur, however, with the same intensity among all scientific disciplines but rather occurs more intensely among some disciplines and is practically absent in others. For this reason, when carrying out bibliographical searches or publishing a research paper, it is convenient to know the other disciplines with which a science in question is related. The objective of this work is to analyze the totality of the education journals indexed in the thematic categories “Education & Educational Research”, “Education Scientific Disciplines”, “Education Special” and “Psychology Educational” of the Journal Citation Report and to know the existing relationships between the scientific journals included in one or more of these four subject categories, as well as existing relationships with other scientific disciplines. These relationships represent the interdisciplinarity that occurs not only in Education, but also with other disciplines or thematic areas included in the JCR. By doing so, we can know the thematic categories closest to the scientific discipline object of a bibliographic search, in our case Education, which can serve to refine both the process of bibliographic search as well as the publication of results. It is observed that the largest number of journals related to education are included in the category “Education & Educational Research” (236 journals) and “Psychology Educational” (58 journals). The third place, in terms of the number of education journals, is in the “Education Scientific Disciplines” category (42 journals), being “Education Special” the subject category, which has the lowest number of journals (38 journals). A bibliometric analysis of all the education journals has been carried out, based on the indicators provided by the JCR. We have analyzed the overlap of existing publications between the different thematic categories, the publishing institution, publication language, country and quartiles occupied by the publication in the different subject categories.

Keywords:

Scientific journals, education, interdisciplinarity, impact factor, JCR.