Publishing in library and information science journals: The success of less experienced researchers

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Abstract

This study explores the publishing success of less experienced researchers including early career researchers in a selection of library and information science journals. The study includes all authors of articles and reviews published in 10 library and information science journals during a 20-year period (2001–2020). The prior publication of each author is determined at the time of publication in one of the ten journals. The analysis includes 14,612 publications and publication histories of 36,417 authors. The results show that there are considerable differences between journals, and that the share of publications by less experienced researchers has generally decreased over time. Library automation journals publish considerably more publications by early career researchers than information science journals do. Publications in these 10 library and information science journals are being published by authors with an increasing publishing experience and fewer papers are being published by author teams with little experience.

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Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995

Howard D. White, Katherine McCain (1998)

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‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics

Cenyu Shen, Bo-Christer Björk (2015)

Background A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution. Methods After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall’s list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays. Results Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher’s country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission. Conclusions Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.