Benefits to the Spanish research community of regional content expansion in Web of Science

The regional content expansion of Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Science added approximately 1,600 journals to the database with a regional as opposed to international focus. Web of Science coverage has grown to reflect the changing nature of global research publication trends and the additional regional journals provide greater visibility to high quality local studies beyond their traditional boundaries. The cited references indexed from the regional journals represent the influence of those journals on both the global and local research communities. This study analyses the impact of adding Spanish regional journals to Web of Science on the publication and citation patterns of Spanish research. The findings demonstrate a recent increase in research output from Spain and this is explained by more Spanish research being produced rather than due to the indexing of more Spanish journals; indeed it is shown that the majority of Spanish research is not published in Spanish journals. An analysis of Spanish journal citations uncovers a Spanish regional citation network previously undetected and serves as valuable information for evaluators of Spanish journals.