From: William Gunn <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 10:44:26 -0700

Joe, the article is newsworthy because it presents a good set of data
showing that "elite" journals are commanding a smaller share of
citations, and because it was published by the Google Scholar team.
Where it was published is quite irrelevant, as we, one of many
intended audiences, are in fact discussing it.

The main conclusion, that changes in how research is discovered is
leading to the shift in which articles are being cited, is not
entirely novel. Studies have looked at changing citation practices and
the effect of Open Access for quite some time, but the interesting bit
is the scale at which this study was done. As with Piketty, you can
agree or disagree with the conclusions, but you can't dispute that
it's an impressive data set.

They didn't show any direct data about a shift in discovery practices,
but anyone who's looked at the referrer logs for their catalog knows
where most of the traffic is coming from. Does Google not dominate
your logs? So to me the point isn't that the elite journals are
somehow devalued - their editorial practices aren't impugned by this
study - just that attention is increasingly being captured by
non-elite journals.

The interesting questions raised are:

* Where are the increased citations to the non-elite coming from?

* Are the citations to the elite increasing commensurate with the
growth of published output, and how does that compare to the growth of
citations to non-elite?

* Are the elite journals still getting the "best" attention?

* What would this study look like if they incorporated altmetrics?

-- William Gunn, Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley


On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 3:34 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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
>