"The main trouble is that journal editors and publishers are often
risk-adverse people who like to maintain a 'bank' of accepted articles
as a safeguard against running out of copy. Some editors accept
many more articles than they can feasibly publish, and so create
a backlog problem."
Tomorrow's Professor Msg.#548 PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH - UNDERSTANDING
THE JOURNALS MARKET
Folks:
The posting below looks at quite thorough look at the journal publishing
process. It is from Chapter 9, Publishing Your Research in Authoring
a PhD: How to plan, draft, write, and finish a doctoral thesis or
dissertation, by Patrick Dunleavy. Palgrave Macmillan © Patrick
Dunleavy 2003. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. Reprinted
with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP DATE: Faculty Evaluation: Work that Matters Should Be Work that
Counts
Tomorrow's Research
------------------------------- 2,637 words -------------------------------
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH - UNDERSTANDING THE JOURNALS MARKET
Academics arrange orthodox print journals into a rough hierarchy
of excellent, above average, average, blow average, and marginal
journals. There are four major influences on journals’ long-run
reputations: their methods of refereeing; their citation scores;
the journal's type and its circulation (which are closely interrelated);
and the overall time lag from first submitting a paper through its
eventual publication.
Referring systems.
Peer group review is the central quality- assurance process in
the academic world, and how well it is handled is crucial for a
journal's standing. A top-rank journal will send your paper to four
diverse and well-qualified referees, and reach an editors’
decision on the basis of three verdicts - quite a demanding threshold
to surmount. It will be able to secure the involvement of senior
members of the profession in reviewing papers. In each discipline
as you go down the hierarchy of journals the publication requirements
will get progressively less strict. A somewhat less prestigious
journal may see views from two or three outside referees and go
on two positives. I may not be able to attract the same quality
of people to look at prospective articles, bearing in mind that
referees are not paid for their efforts.
Lowering down in the hierarchy in most professions are those journals
which do not run proper independent refereeing. Instead they may
serve mainly as a vehicle for a 'referencing circle' around a particular
clique in the profession. Similarly, more 'ideological' journals
may single-mindedly plug a particular viewpoint, without ever publishing
critical work undertaken from divergent positions. Some journals
may referee internally only amongst an editorial team, or perhaps
the editors may somewhat 'rig' who gets the write the references,
so as to attract positive responses from their referees for material
they want to accept. This is especially the case if the journal
positively needs copy just to keep its pages filled, or is struggling
to keep alive the apparent level of interest in their viewpoint
or their subfield. However, there are important exceptions to this
general pattern. In many humanities, arts and social science disciplines
there are still quite prestigious !
journals with large circulations, which none the less do not operate
on the basis of professional-standard peer group refereeing.
In addition to the number of opinions that editors seek, there are
also important differences in the conditions under which refereeing
takes place. The best journals tend to use a 'double-blind' system
of refereeing. Here anything that would identify the author is removed
before the paper goes to referees. The referee then writes an anonymous
comment, which normally comes back to you. (To comply with this
approach, you usually need to have two title pages on a paper you
submit. The first shows all the author names, their university affiliations
and any other identifying elements, such as a note of thanks. The
journal removes this page before sending the paper out to referees.
The second page is retained and shows only the article title without
any author-identifying
elements.) This system is supposed to protect new authors from being
rejected just because they are unknown. It is meant to put them
more on an even plane with established authors. It is also supposed
to prevent rivalries between academic personalities colouring what
referees write,
and to prevent any automatic 'taking sides' by referees. At the
same time referees’ anonymity ensures that they can be frank
and say what they really think, without worrying that adverse professional
consequences might attach to them in future if they comment unfavourably.
Some
journals now use 'single-blind' refereeing, where referees know
who authors are but can still comment anonymously. The final option
is an 'open' approach where referees know who authors are and authors
know who has commented on their work. Some editors feel that double-blind
refereeing is fake, because experienced referees can usually scan
the literature references and work out who authors are. Equally,
sheltering behind the cloak of anonymity, unaccountable referees
may be overly
critical or negative in their reviews. But most professional association
journals still abide by the double-blind system, and in my view
its value for new authors is still considerable.
Citation scores
Every year the ISI 'Web of Knowledge' bibliometric system counts
how much articles published in each of the journals it indexes are
referenced across all its journals in social
sciences and in the humanities. (These systems used to be known
as the Social Science Citation Index and the Humanities Citation
Index, but have been rebranded.) The Web of Knowledge’s coverage
is heavily biased towards the United States and towards English-language
journals more
generally. It is very patchy in some particular fields like law,
where most UK or other overseas journals are not covered. Despite
these limitations, as in other walks of life, partial or inadequate
data like these are widely seen as preferable to no data at all.
Every serious academic wants to be noticed, and so faute de mieux,
the Web of Knowledge’s scores influence where the academic
'stars' send their papers. They also are key ways in which journals
try to measure how well they are doing against their competitors.
Despite all the elaborate arrangements for sifting and improving
academic papers most current evidence shows that the median journal
article is referred to by nobody in the five years after it is published,
and very few articles have a referencing life longer than this.
In major bibliometric analyses (like the ISI indices) the leading
journals in most disciplines are those which manage to achieve an
impact score over or reasonably close to 1. This means that on average
each of their published papers is referred to at least once in five
years by some other paper in one of the journals included in the
analysis. Any journal with an average citation score of more than
0.5 is also doing relatively well. Many perfectly reputable journals
may have citation scores of below 0.25,
meaning that papers there have a less than one-in-four chance of
being referenced by anyone else.
Circulation and journal type
The chances of anyone else noticing your work partly depend upon
how many people even get to eyeball the journal where it has appeared.
Large-circulation journals are often those which are longest-lived
in a particular discipline. Having reached good world-wide library
access long ago (around 2000 to 300 copies or above), they can to
some extent rely on inertial ordering and librarians’ concern
for continuity to shield them from current market forces. Often
these are 'omnibus' journals with rather a broad mission to cover
a whole discipline, especially those run by prestigious professional
associations.
By contrast, most recent start-up journals (in the last thirty
years) have been specialist journals with much more focused markets
and editorial statements of intent. The actual paying circulation
of many new or specialized journals, even those which have been
running for a decade, may be counted in the tens or at best low
hundreds. Commercial publishers have kept on starting new specialist
journals, even since the last 1990s when the academic market has
been shrinking. Some of the circulations for these titles are so
low that there is a real risk to the academics who
submit papers – initially that very few people will ever get
sight of the journal. In the longer term there may be some degree
of risk that a small, newish journal may fold and its materials
become even less accessible.
Time lags
Journal publishing is a game of many parts. First the editors send
your paper out to their required number of referees. These people
then sit on it for a certain period before responding, usually taking
six weeks to three months, even for an efficiently run journal.
In many fields responses can drag on much longer, up to four to
six months, because scrupulous editors have to collect in a sufficient
comments to make a decision, which always takes longer than a single
reference. Next the editors have to work through their in-tray of
refereed submissions and decide how to respond to your paper in
the light of the comments and scores, which usually take several
weeks, adding perhaps another month. Once your article is accepted
without further substantive revisions, then it goes into a publication
queue. Time lags from acceptance to publication in journals are
almost always at least 6 months, and probably average around 12
months. Good journals will also publish their stati!
stics in an annual report, either on their Web site or in the journal
pages itself. Most reputable journals now indicate when paper were
accepted, and some will give details of how long the editorial process
took.
The main trouble is that journal editors and publishers are often
risk-adverse people who like to maintain a 'bank' of accepted articles
as a safeguard against running out of copy. Some editors accept
many more articles than they can feasibly publish, and so create
a backlog problem.
In some pathological cases the editors of highly prestigious journals
can create a time lag from acceptance to publication which is up
to 30 months or even three years. This approach makes a complete
mockery of any journal's role to provide swift, lively an contemporaneous
feedback to
their academic profession. At the other extreme there are hand-to-mouth
journals which only get by through their editors constantly living
on their wits, acquiring papers at conferences, and so on. Here
the copy for the very next issue may be problematic, so if your
paper arrives at an opportune moment the editors may bend over backwards
to accept it and publish it quickly. This might seem a good result
for you, but only if the journal has a significant circulation and
has maintained its quality reputation despite copy shortages.
In addition to these major influences on the long-run standing
of journals, there are further four shorter-term or less important
influences on how journals are seen by the profession. These factors
may not matter so much for the most-cited journals. But for all
other titles they are worth considering because they help to differentiate
the middle mass of journals one from another.
The reputation of the editors (or editorial teams) and the editorial
board.
Despite the importance of refereeing systems, changes of editor
can have an important influence on how journals develop within their
long-run market niches. Academic love speculating about what different
editors’ priorities are, especially for the bigger omnibus
journals. Editing a journal is a thankless task, but one which tends
to attract senior academics at a certain stage in their careers.
A good editor is someone who is well known in the discipline, intellectually
respected but not close-minded, and who can project a strong and
distinctive style for her journal. The editors who become best known
often have a 'project' for changing their journal's appeal in a
particular direction. Good editors are also often interested in
new ideas and in bringing on younger people in their discipline
via helpful and supportive refereeing. They are always committed
to encouraging good writing, strong scholarship and improved standards
of professional communication. The conference !
circuit gossip machine is often the best guide on where different
journals stand in terms of the editors’ orientation –
yet another reason for getting out there and plugging in.
Editorial boards (sometimes also called advisory boards) are a
much more distant influence on what journals do than are the editors.
But the extent to which a journal has well-known and senior people
on its editorial board can provide a fair indication of where it
stands in the international profession. If it has no one well known
involved as a board member it may have only a small circulation,
or there ma be some problem in its approach to refereeing.
Professional ownership versus commercial ownership.
In general, journals run by professional bodies in each of the
disciplines have higher prestige than those which are chiefly set
up by commercial publishers and entrepreneurial academics to each
a major buck. Professional journals are normally supplied free to
members of the professional association as part of their overall
subscription, which tends to mean that far more individual readers
in at least its home country will routinely notice that your paper
has been published. There are far fewer individual subscriptions
to commercial journals, and so readers mainly have to come across
your paper in the library or look it up directly. The chief reasons
why people find your material are because they regularly search
particular journals’ electronic contents; because a colleague
or the journal’s e-mail alerting service draws their attention
to it; or because they are starting a new article or research project
of their own and hence are doing a systematic literature trawl.
Survey responses. Most of the key professional groups in the major
countries survey their members each year on how they rate their
discipline's journals. These responses often provide invaluable
guidance about which journals are actually being read by academics
and students in the different fields. Articles in prestigious journals
are quite frequently unreadably dense or too esoteric for most professional
readers. Their high level of citations can be sustained at any on
time by
a small group of elite academics citing each other but not necessarily
being read or followed more widely. Sometimes a cohesive refereeing
circle or lesser authors can also achieve high (mutual) citation
scores.
Quality of production.
Journals vary greatly in their 'look and feel'. Older journals,
and those run by professional bodies, often have a cramped, unattractive
appearance. Indeed some misguided editors deliberately cultivate
a classical' (that is, unreadable) format for their journals, under
the illusion that this makes them look more academically 'respectable'.
From an author's point of view this approach is liability. You want
your journal offprints to look prestigious and presentable to appointment
and promotion committees for a long time ahead, not nondescript
and old-fashioned within a few years. Other things being equal,
it is always best to go for journals that have a stylish and simple
modern design and clear, uncluttered layouts, incorporating appropriate
amounts of white space around your text. Good handling of equations,
graphics, charts and tables is important in the social sciences.
All these points of comparison above assume that you are considering
publishing in an orthodox journal that essentially sells paper copies
as the basis of its subscriptions. Even these journals have responded
extensively to the grown of the Internet by expanding their electronic
presence. Virtually all titles are available electronically via
major contents aggregator sites (like Ingenta or Jstor) and some
journals also have electronic-only subscriptions. In addition to
the paper circulation of journals it may be worth learning about
your possible target journal’s
electronic readerships, including the number of times articles were
downloaded. Some journals will also publish articles in enhanced
form electronically, such as using colourized versions instead of
being confined to the black-and-white of the normal print version.
Other print titles do 'advance on publication', putting up forthcoming
articles for on- line access on their Web sites as soon as they
are accepted, rather than waiting for the relevant journal issue
to be printed. This way your article is officially seen as published
six months earlier than otherwise, which can be important when you
are looking for an academic job.
A further way to curtail the acceptance-to-publication delay is
to publish in a Web-only journal, which is published electronically
but not in print. Such titles are common now in the physical sciences,
and they are beginning to spring up too in parts of the humanities
and social sciences, especially in areas like information science,
informatics and business studies. Where they have become established
some refereed Web- only journals are starting to be quite successful
and well read. But this is still a developing area, and across most
the humanities and social sciences Web-only articles are not yet
as full publications.
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