From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 10:05:50 +0100

I have not yet read the article and am NOT a statistician (and look
forward to comments) but I would like to make two points, both of
which are based on CIBER (qualitative) research some of it done by me
personally and which involved interviewing researchers.

See:  http://www.ciber-research.eu/download/20140115-Trust_Final_Report.pdf

and various article in the literature and still coming out.

Researchers seem to have the same hierarchy of journals which they aim
to publish in and if they have a "good" paper they try to get into the
"best" journal not necessarily to top ranked by impact factor but
often the top ranked. I suggest that as the number of researchers
increase, they increase faster than the number of pages in (say)
Nature or Science both of which are constrained by print.

Secondly there is a distinction between building on and citing other
articles. The picture that we found was that most researchers have a
collection of information sources which they and their groups hold on
to and build on. Subsequent research on downloads and curation of
downloaded articles seems to show how this collection is handled.
However when the article is ready for submission some of the
researchers who described their citation practices in detail searched
in Google Scholar, found and scanned relevant articles not previously
known to them or used and added these citations. When I write
"scanned" in preference to "read" I am assuming that perhaps the
reading of the articles was less thorough (to say the least) than
those articles used as a foundation for the research being done.

I am sure other people can give more authoritative comments on all
this but I personally was struck by this extra trawl which I could not
find referred to in what I read of the literature on citing practices
which is extensive

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 20:27:07 -0400

Via InfoDocket:

A study by the Google Scholar team on the rise in importance of
non-elite journals has been deposited in arXiv.  The abstract is
reproduced below.  Any thoughts about the validity of the findings?
Do they take into account the overall growth of article publishing in
the time frame examined?   What's really going on here?  Ann

*******

http://www.infodocket.com/2014/10/08/new-research-from-google-rise-of-the-rest-the-growing-impact-of-non-elite-journals/

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the impact of non-elite
journals. We attempt to answer two questions. First, what fraction of
the top-cited articles are published in non-elite journals and how has
this changed over time. Second, what fraction of the total citations
are to non-elite journals and how has this changed over time.

We studied citations to articles published in 1995-2013. We computed
the 10 most-cited journals and the 1000 most-cited articles each year
for all 261 subject categories in Scholar Metrics. We marked the 10
most-cited journals in a category as the elite journals for the
category and the rest as non-elite.

There are two conclusions from our study. First, the fraction of
top-cited articles published in non-elite journals increased steadily
over 1995-2013. While the elite journals still publish a substantial
fraction of high-impact articles, many more authors of well-regarded
papers in diverse research fields are choosing other venues.

The number of top-1000 papers published in non-elite journals for the
representative subject category went from 149 in 1995 to 245 in 2013,
a growth of 64%. Looking at broad research areas, 4 out of 9 areas saw
at least one-third of the top-cited articles published in non-elite
journals in 2013. For 6 out of 9 areas, the fraction of top-cited
papers published in non-elite journals for the representative subject
category grew by 45% or more.

Second, now that finding and reading relevant articles in non-elite
journals is about as easy as finding and reading articles in elite
journals, researchers are increasingly building on and citing work
published everywhere. Considering citations to all articles, the
percentage of citations to articles in non-elite journals went from
27% in 1995 to 47% in 2013. Six out of nine broad areas had at least
50% of citations going to articles published in non-elite journals in
2013.