DETERMINING THE CORE OF JOURNALS OF A RESEARCH-CENTER - 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 whi ch researchers of INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research) publish. The corpus is comprised of 671 articles published over a peri od of four years in 258 journals. The advantage of the method applied for determining the visibility of journals is that it combines two app roaches: a) bibliometric indicators (coverage by the ISI-publications and by two specific French databases) and b) experts' opinions (10 eco nomists and sociologists). The main results are: a) There is a converg ence between the opinion of the experts and visibility, in the databas es, b) The impact factor confirms the main opinions of the experts. Th e first journals ranked by the experts and JCR Social Sciences are the same but represent only 40 per cent of the total journals analysed. T he other journals were revealed by the experts and French databases. ' 'Whoever seeks to pass a balanced but lucid judgement on the general t rends of the activity carried out by the profession to which he belong s, is liable to say either banalities or to hurt his colleagues''