From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 08:41:50 +0100

Following from Anthony's comments, its also not necessarily an
either/or decision, whether to publish in an elite or a niche journal.
Plenty of research projects consist of several parts, some authors
publish bits in more specialised, lower-impact journals, perhaps
precisely in order to get the feedback they want, or perhaps because a
wider audience might not be interested in the level of detail of a
particular part of the research; and then publish an overview of the
whole project in a broader-based, higher impact journal. That strategy
gives them the best of both worlds: sharing with and learning from
their own community, and brownie points for a high IF publication too.

Bill Hughes

----- Original Message ----- From: "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2014 12:44 AM
Subject: Re: Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals


> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 10:36:28 +0100
>
> I do completely agree with Bill. As I see it, researchers have a
> complex hierarchy of journals. Almost all in science would place
> Science or Nature at the top. However below that there is a hierarchy
> in their own discipline, which is not just a matter of the impact
> factor but is a more complex judgement passed down from mentor to
> mentor. Sometimes work being reported on is perceived as of wider
> interest - to the whole scientific community even - or to the whole
> discipline.
>
> Sometimes work being reported is more specialised and is of interest
> (only) to a niche community with its own journal. The research is not
> necessarily inferior (look at the work on transposons which led
> eventually to a Nobel prize) but sometimes it is not actually very
> good and one knows it. There are special complications with
> interdisciplinary work. If two groups, one in physics and one in
> clinical medicine, are writing a paper together the physics component
> will be trusted by the clinicians with submitting to an appropriate
> physics journal and vice versa. I know there is a lot of literature
> about how groups work but I am not sure how much research there is on
> how groups decide where to submit and why. I am sure there is some
> literature but I have not time to look for it.
>
> I am writing here as a researcher as well as a former publisher and am
> familiar with behaviour Bill and I describe from both standpoints.
>
> Anthony
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:37:31 +0100
>
> As well as the slots in elite journals being constant, this story
> seems to me not to be news because it just reflects longstanding
> researcher behaviour:  as well as wanting to publish in elite
> journals, a lot of researchers also want to engage with the (often
> tiny) community that is specifically interested in their own topic, a
> community which can offer advice, criticism, avenues for further
> research, collaboration etc etc.  So they also publish in what they
> regard as the most appropriate journal, elite or not. Of course anyone
> working in acoustics, say, wants the prestige of being published in
> the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; but, if his
> particular field is building acoustics, and if feedback is one of the
> things he is looking for, s/he won't get much from that journal whose
> content is mostly concerned with speech, hearing, pyschological
> aspects, animal noise etc, presumably reflecting readership interest.
>
> Bill Hughes
> Director
> Multi-Science Publishing Co Ltd
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:18:06 -0400
>>
>> Not persuasive.  The number of articles continues to grow, the number
>> of slots in the so-called elite journals is pretty much constant.  If
>> all the seats are taken at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, do we expect
>> parents to tell their kids not to go to college at all?  Would we
>> expect that someone who attends the U. of Michigan or Villanova has no
>> economic contribution to make?  The question about this article is why
>> anyone thinks it is newsworthy.  Where was it published again?
>>
>> Joe Esposito
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 8:17 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From: John Sack <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 05:49:53 -0700
>>>
>>> I am forwarding this response on behalf of Anurag Acharya at Google
>>>
>>> John Sack
>>> Founding Director
>>> HighWire Press
>>>
>>> -----
>>>
>>> I would like to clarify couple of things about our paper. My comments
>>> are inline below,
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> anurag
>>>
>>> Corey Murata writes:
>>>
>>> The basic flaw in the research is centered around how they identify
>>> 'elite journals.'
>>>
>>> First, they are using incredibly broad disciplinary groupings from
>>> Google Scholar Metrics:
>>>
>>> http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues
>>>
>>> Economics, for example is lumped in with Business and Management, and
>>> if you look at the top ten journals in that broad group the only
>>> management journal is MIS Quarterly, all the rest are Economics and
>>> Finance.
>>>
>>> [[ANURAG]] As described in the Methods section of the paper, elite
>>> journals are identified  for each of the 261 specific subject
>>> categories (eg Immunology or Accounting & Taxation or Gender Studies
>>> or Finance) and NOT at the level of broad areas (eg Health & Medical
>>> Sciences or Business, Economics & Management).
>>>
>>> To get an overview of changes within each broad area, we determined
>>> the median, the 25th, and the 75th percentile subject categories
>>> within each area. We then picked the median subject category in each
>>> broad area as the representative for the area and plotted data for
>>> all three of median/25th-percentile/75th-percentile categories in the
>>> per-area graphs in Figure 2. The median/25th/75th percentile
>>> categories were computed afresh for every year to ensure that they
>>> remain representative of the area (details are in the Methods
>>> section).
>>>
>>> Second, they ignore the increase in the number and specialization of
>>> journals over the period of the study. This increasing availability
>>> of journals that are 'core' to a sub-disciplinary group of scholars
>>> would naturally lead to more high-quality articles being published
>>> outside of the 'elite' journals as defined by the authors of this
>>> paper. The increasing number of journals also means that the ten
>>> 'elite' journals becomes a progressively smaller percentage of the
>>> total scholarly output over time.
>>>
>>> [[ANURAG]] As mentioned above, the list of elite journals was
>>> computed separately for each of the 261 specific subject categories.
>>> Which means there are over 2500 journals that are considered elite
>>> each year. As mentioned in the Methods section, the list of elite
>>> (and
>>> non-elite) journals for each subject category was recomputed for each
>>> year. So shifts in the focus of a subject category or new journals
>>> that become a part of the "core" set would be reflected.
>>>
>>> The Methods section of the paper also mentions that the number of
>>> articles considered top-cited each year in a subject category was
>>> fixed at 1000. Therefore, growth in the total number of articles
>>> published isn't a significant factor.  The top ten journals in a
>>> subject category, as a group, publish more than 1000 articles per
>>> year.