Are nationally oriented journals indexed in Scopus becoming more international? The effect of publication language and access modality

•The paper examines whether nationally oriented journals entering Scopus are becoming more international.•An Index of National Orientation (INO) is used, based on the geographical distribution of a journals’ publishing and citing authors.•The relationship between a journal’s national orientation and its citation impact is found to be inverse U-shaped.•About 40 per cent of journals do reveal traces of internationalization•The use of English as publication language and an Open Access (OA) status are important determinants. 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.