Profile. Issues in teachers` professional development Vol.19 No.2

The quote from Canagarajah shows the situation most academic journals have recently been going through in developing countries. In the Colombian scenario, academic publications like PROFILE are being demanded to comply more and more with regulations emanating from Colciencias, the Colombian research agency in charge of the classification of the scientific journals edited within the country (Colciencias, 2010, 2016). Its latest rules have relied heavily on JeR (Journal Citation Reports, led by Thomson) and SJR (Scientífic journal Ranking, managed by Scopus) and, to a lesser extent, on the hs index (h5). The changes introduced in the national policies are based on the need to measure the impact of the national scientific production and to increase its acknowledgment in the international picture. The h5 index examines the number of citations made per article in a period of 5 years using Google Scholar and measures researchers and journals impact. 

To our surprise, two local initiatives, Redalyc (Red de Revistas Científicas de America Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal) and SCiELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), created and led in the Latin American región, have not been given the same role in defining the classification of journals. Colciencias is more inclined to accept the standards born in the heart of the West, which is to say within the Americo- European boundaries. 

Colciencias (2016) has eagerly tried to align the measurement of Colombian research and journal impact to international standards. In the words of Colciencias, the idea is to gain robustness, reliability, and the appropriation of the production of knowledge in the many different disciplines. However, we do not understand why the peculiarities of journals from humanities and social sciences are not taken into consideration when deciding upon the databases and indexing systems that serve as reliable and appropriate for evaluation purposes.