Determining the core of journals of a research centre: The example of researchers from the department of rural economy and sociology of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, France

This paper analyses the determination of visibility of journals in which researchers of INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research) publish. The corpus is comprised of 671 articles published over a period of four years in 258 journals. The advantage of the method applied for determining the visibility of journals is that it combines two approaches: a) bibliometric indicators (coverage by the ISI-publications and by two specific French databases) and b) experts' opinions (10 economists and sociologists). The main results are: a) There is a convergence between the opinion of the experts and visibility, in the databases, b) The impact factor confirms the main opinions of the experts. The first journals ranked by the experts and JCR Social Sciences are the same but represent only 40 per cent of the total journals analysed. The other journals were revealed by the experts and French databases. ''Whoever seeks to pass a balanced but lucid judgement on the general trends of the activity carried out by the profession to which he belongs, is liable to say either banalities or to hurt his colleagues''