  An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation
of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of
publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an
Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO
values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values
and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal
impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the
geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as the relationship
between a journal's national orientation and its citation impact is found to be
inverse U-shaped. In addition, journals publishing in English are not
necessarily internationally oriented in terms of the affiliations of publishing
or citing authors; in social sciences and humanities also USA has their
nationally oriented literatures. The paper examines the extent to which
nationally oriented journals entering Scopus in earlier years, have become in
recent years more international. It is found that in the study set about 40 per
cent of such journals does reveal traces of internationalization, while the use
of English as publication language and an Open Access (OA) status are important
determinants.
