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.