Growing international competition among universities is increasingly requiring accreditation by renowned international agencies, such as the AACSB (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), towards which ISEG is now in process of accreditation. One of the priority criteria for accreditation is the evaluation of scientific productivity  through bibliometric indicators of the scientific articles published in renowned international journals. These journals are classified in highly reputed international repertoires, such as ISI, SCOPUS and ABS. For a number of reasons, below mentioned, such journals are essentially mainstream, which impairs the classification of research from countries with less developed scientific communities, such as Portugal. Within their narrow discretion, the academic authorities of these countries often try  to adapt those criteria to the national realities and to introduce some flexible mechanisms in the evaluation of scientific production.

The evaluation conditions and career progression of the ISEG's  faculty also depend on the publishing of research production in international journals and  repertoires such as the above mentioned.  However, some of ISEG's faculty's scientific output fall outside those repertoires, although it may prove to be of great importance for the clarification of pressing problems of the Portuguese economy and business world.

In this paper we aim to assess the relative weight of ISEG's scientific output that risks being obscured by not being published in the reference repertoires and if their content takes into account relevant Portuguese issues in the fields of economics and management. We will investigate what methodologies are then followed  by the responsible bodies of the ISEG, and in particular by its Scientific Council, to assess the quality and validate this non-mainstream production.production.

We will then consider, in comparative terms, the way ISEG classifies scientific publications that fall outside these repertoires versus those in these repertoires and how the inherent classification impacts on teachers and researchers evaluation.

Academic authorities and research policies, in general, fall often into ambivalent positions. The imperative transformation that the globalization process has imposed on research systems requires scientific results to be increasingly harmonized and to comply with criteria and benchmarks of international recognition. The reputation of these referentials, such as the bibliographic repertoires above mentioned, stems largely from the size of the market they serve and  is greatly enhanced by the largest USA and UK research and higher education units.  Having English as their primary language favors an increase in the number of readings, downloads and quotations (Solomon, 2014). This reputational process has been self-feeding on the basis of an erroneous inference: if an article is largely quoted it will have a high impact factor and hence will be considered of high quality. As the US controls a large share of the world's R & D budget, half of which is reinvested in the US itself, the citation and cross-referencing mechanism increasingly favors US research units and their values, which are then widespread throughout the world (Mingers and Willmott 2012 ; Altbach, 2015).

Under the risk of no access to scientific research certification and funding, in particular of external origin, the authorities and research policies of the peripheral countries are forced to embrace mainstream research path. On the other hand, they are confronted with a mismatch between research aligned with dominant thinking and the real problems of the societies in which they live. This raises the question of the social utility of scientific research (Apple, 2014; Bornmann, Stefaner, Moya Anègon and Mutz, 2014). This problem is all the more aggravated by the fact that scientific policy in such countries attempts to follow that of the dominant economies, mainly because they lack an own scientific strategy (Sotorauta and Kosonen, 2003).

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