The International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE), co-published by the UOC and the University of Los Andes, is a world opinion leader in education

The International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE) is ranked in the first quartile of education and the second of applied computer science, according to the Scopus database, which analyses a series of quality indicators of scientific publications around the world. This journal, specialized in e-learning research, is co-published by the UOC and the University of Los Andes (Colombia).

The Scopus database provides various indicators. Most notable is CiteScore, which measures the relationship between the citations received over a three-year period and the number of articles published by the journal. The ETHE's impact result in CiteScore for 2016 is 1.33. This index, CiteScore, puts the journal in the first quartile (Q1, 76 percentile) in the discipline of education. In the field of applied computer science, which it has entered for the first time, it is ranked at 55 percentile, that is, in the second quartile, Q2.

The ETHE's results in the two fields in question are excellent news for its editorial team, authors and readers, and for the UOC. According to the journal's co-director, Josep M. Duart, “this result is the outcome of years of coordinated work with the reviewers, the editors of the dossiers, the authors and the journal's editorial team".

Scientific articles' positioning is fundamental

The publication of a scientific article is the tip of the iceberg of publishing work, the result of hours of research at a university or research centre. To increase the impact and visibility of articles, a lot of work both before and after publication is needed: the article's positioning in the search engines must be optimized; it must be promoted on social, academic and trade media, and visual presentations must be made and disseminated. It is ongoing and planned work, and the results come in the long term.

There are indicators that serve to measure the impact of scientific articles and publications. They range from the traditional impact factors, which measure the impact by counting the number of citations received in a journal, to the altmetrics, which measure the articles individually, adding their visibility in the social media, communication media and official reference documents. The ETHE has obtained excellent results in all these metrics.

Internationalization of the journal

ETHE is managed by Josep M. Duart (UOC), Álvaro Galvis (UniAndes) and Rosalind James (University of New England, Australia). Its internationalization has become more firmly established in the last semester: in terms of authors, 89% are from outside Spain, and 116 reviewers from 34 countries have taken part in the journal's scientific review process. During 2017, articles by Asian, American, African and European authors have been published. Of these articles, three are part of the dossier "Games and simulation in higher education", edited by Angel A. Juan, Birgit Loch, Sebastian Ventura and Thanasis Daradoumis. The remaining articles of this issue, focused on the subject of gamification, will be published during July.

Precisely with the goal of assuring this publication's excellence, Duart attended last week the annual meeting of editors of journals published by Springer Nature, held in New York. The experts discussed important issues for the future of scientific publications, such as quality control in the articles' review process, the increase in the articles' social and academic impact, and everything related with open data, among other subjects.