The geotemporal demographics of academic journals from 1950 to 2013 according to Ulrich's database

Academic journals play a critical role in recording and transferring knowledge. However, the geographic evolution and spatial autocorrelation of the distribution of academic journals have yet to be fully investigated. Inspired by this gap, we used descriptive analysis and exploratory spatial data analysis to reveal the cross-country inequality, globalization process and spatial autocorrelation of academic journals from 1950 to 2013 based on the Ulrichsweb database. We found that: (1) there was a tremendous disparity in the distribution of academic journals at the country level; (2) both the cross-country inequality of academic journals and the differences in academic publishing between the top three publishing countries witnessed a wavy trend; (3) the US, Eastern Asia and Europe were the central regions while Africa and Central Asia were lagging behind; (4) most of the academic journals in the top ten publishing countries were technology-based, and the proportion of academic journals in the field of Social Sciences and Technology went up; (5) most of the top ten publishing countries have experienced a rising-decreasing-stabilizing pattern of academic journals' growth before 2000; (6) the temporal and spatial variation of the distribution of academic journals may be attributed to political and economic factors; (7) the spatial autocorrelation of the distribution of academic journal was firstly strengthened and mitigated; (8) the European cluster has been the hot-spot area in academic journal publishing since 1950.