Abstract
In recent years, the field of mathematics education has witnessed the emergence of several journal rankings. Within these rankings, Ibero-American journals have had little—to almost no—presence. This raises awareness on the current state of journal indexes and on what these indexes do and how they have been used in constituting sites of exclusion within the mathematics education community. We contend that ranking systems are perceived as the philosopher’s stone of academia, in the sense that they have the ability to convert any material (an article, a journal, the academic production of a scholar) into a precious material within the academic world. This alchemic move not only exacerbates exclusion, but also configures a point system that constitutes places for enjoyment and fetishistic disavowal within researchers. Thus, we want to challenge the assumption that mainstream journal rankings are able to accurately reflect the quality, impact, and reputation of mathematics education journals by taking as “empirical data” the Ibero-American journals in the field of mathematics education. In problematizing journal ranking effects in the production, dissemination, and socialization of knowledge, we seek to open a discussion regarding the economic-political dynamics that govern publishing practices in mathematics education and that are entangled in the production of knowledge in our discipline.
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Notes
By productivity we refer to the naturalized move within the academic life of scholars and of the region as a whole. Productivity of scholars entails that the highest number of publications is desirable and that the journals in which those publications are submitted are considered only if these are top journals. Productivity, in this sense, would seem to normalize day-to-day practices of researchers and to evaluate their performance. Regarding the productivity of the region, we believe that this may not be represented by top rankings. This is one of our main concerns since there are only a couple of Ibero-American journals in the rankings, whereas it is possible to see how active a region is by the increasing number of journals and the incorporation of these journals in different indexes—a phenomenon that apparently has gone unnoticed.
Quality is a transversal issue in this paper. Although quality was not defined in the questionnaire, we asked by quality journals in order to delimit the consulted experts’ answers. Therefore, in this paper, quality is taken as a subjective matter in function of what each consulted expert understands by quality journals. Moreover, in mathematics education research, there are some studies concerned with quality in mathematics education—for example, Williams and Leatham (2017) and Nivens and Otten (2017)—in which is possible to find some understanding of quality.
We are aware that this comprehensive list cannot be exhaustive. This is so because there may be journals that were not detected through the method that we deployed, but also because the production of journals in Ibero-America seems to be in a state of effervescence where new journals constantly appear. For instance, during the reviewing process of this manuscript, we identified another five Ibero-American journals of mathematics education, three of which were created during the years 2018 and 2019. These five titles are included at the end of the comprehensive list.
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Andrade-Molina, M., Montecino, A. & Aguilar, M.S. Beyond quality metrics: defying journal rankings as the philosopher’s stone of mathematics education research. Educ Stud Math 103, 359–374 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-020-09932-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-020-09932-9