Presence and visibility of local journals in international scientific databases

Mainstream databases present significant language, geographical, disciplinary, and thematic biases, particularly against research addressing local needs. Evaluation policies framed around mainstream-based indicators tend to reproduce these biases and, consequently, underestimate local research. We address this issue empirically by merging four databases and conducting a large-scale analysis of local journals across mainstream (WOS and Scopus) and non-mainstream (OpenAlex and DOAJ) knowledge circuits. We aim to (1) determine the representation of local journals in the four databases, (2) assess the visibility of the fields and countries publishing in them, and (3) examine their non-English and open access features. We build a dataset of more than 75,000 OpenAlex journals, which are enriched with WOS, Scopus, and DOAJ variables and characterised as local or global according to a local research framework. Results show that most local journals are poorly represented in the mainstream, regardless of their field, language, or access type. Countries publishing in non-English and open access local journals do not follow clear patterns when examined from different locality perspectives, although Latin America's limited mainstream presence is more consistently associated with them. One conclusion is straightforward: local journals circulate primarily outside the mainstream, in knowledge circuits that are particularly important for the Global South. From a policy perspective, local research should not be discussed and evaluated solely from the content covered by WOS and Scopus.