Spanish scientific and technical journals. State of the art

This article analyses the current situation in the field of scientific and technical journals published in Spain, by determining the following scientific indicators for each: I: Specifications. II: Scientific production covered. III: Visibility and accessibility. The first section provides a qualitative and quantitative study of the journals, asking what subjects they cover, who publishes them, how often they are published, how up to data they are and whether the way they are presented meets international publishing standards. The second section analyses scientific production by research sectors and the percentage of articles collected in the ICYT database compared with the total number of papers published in the journals studied. It also studies the reference habits of the authors published therein to identify whether the literature referred to is of local origin or international. Finally, the third section deduces these journals' degree of visibility by analysing how they are distributed amongst the usual media, i.e. international periodicals directories and databases, and how efficiently they work as vehicles for the diffusion of research by foreign authors. The study covers 10 years (1980–1989), thus enabling to recognise past and current trends in Spanish scientific literature.