Nazarovets, Maryna; Beigel, Fernanda; Van Schalkwyk, François B.; Taşkın, Zehra; Meng, Ping
University journals (UJs) are often described as local or inward-looking, although national and institutional embeddedness are rarely distinguished. This study examines the internationally indexed segment of university journals, analysing Web of Science-indexed titles from seven countries with contrasting publishing traditions and evaluation regimes (Argentina, China, Germany, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom), based on publications from 2022-2024. National anchoring (N-Anch) measures the share of papers with at least one author from the journal’s home country, while institutional anchoring (I-Anch) captures participation by authors from the publishing university. The results reveal a clear divergence between these dimensions. National anchoring is high in Türkiye, China, Ukraine, South Africa, and Argentina, but considerably lower in Germany and UK university-press journals. Institutional anchoring remains low across all countries. Thus, strong integration into a national research community does not imply institutional anchoring. The findings show that patterns of national and institutional anchoring vary substantially across countries with different research, evaluation, and publishing systems and cannot be explained by university ownership alone.