Scholarly Kitchen Logo2017 brings with it a clean slate, a chance to take the lessons of 2016 and put them into practice. Before we move forward, a quick look back at The Scholarly Kitchen’s 2016 (all numbers as of December 30, 2016).

2016 saw more than 1,242,000 pageviews on the site. This brings us lifetime (since 2008) to nearly 8 million views (7,911,459 to be exact with just over 33,000 comments). Phil Davis was our most-read author, accounting for 16% of our traffic. Most of our traffic came directly to the site (whether by bookmark or email notification), around 22% via search engines, 4% via Twitter, less than 2% from Facebook. The next largest source of traffic was Retraction Watch, which sent around 6,600 readers our way (thanks, guys). Our Twitter account has 14,100 followers.

The top 10 most-read posts in the last year were all from 2016, which hopefully says something good about our timeliness in addressing issues of concern to the community. They were, in order:

As PLOS ONE Shrinks, 2015 Impact Factor Expected To Rise, a post which perhaps jumped the gun as the journal’s Impact Factor for 2015 once again fell.

Sci-Hub, How Does It Work? (one of many posts on Sci-Hub to reach our top ten)

Seven Things Every Researcher Should Know About Scholarly Publishing

Scientific Reports On Track To Become Largest Journal In The World (continuing the fascination with megajournals, perhaps the great business success story of recent years in our industry)

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to OA (more Sci-Hub)

Visualizing Citation Cartels (issues of fraud and questioning the confidence one should put in the literature were certainly big themes for the year)

Elsevier Acquires SSRN (one of the many mergers and acquisitions in a year of continued consolidation)

Sci-Hub and Academic Identity Theft: An Open Letter to University Faculty Everywhere (expect authentication and internet security to be an important focus in 2017)

Sci-Hub and the Four Horsemen of the Internet

Why Some Publishers are Requiring ORCID iDs for Authors: An Interview with Stuart Taylor, The Royal Society (the use of persistent identifiers is just starting to reach a point where we can fully take advantage of the power they offer).

An interesting mix of authors and subjects for the year. At the end of 2015, I made my prediction for 2016 in one word, “more”. It was certainly a year in which the honeymoon ended for the irrational exuberance put toward the democratization of unfettered information online. The consequences of the “publish everything and let the wisdom of the crowds sort it out” philosophy have been clearly demonstrated. How we respond will make for an interesting 2017, and I suspect this will be a year of reckoning — what do we want from our information sources and are we willing to pay the costs to make that happen?

Something we’re looking forward to — a new Scholarly Kitchen site is coming soon. We’ve been working away at a Kitchen renovation over the last half of 2016, and should be ready to launch in the coming weeks. The image above offers a sneak preview, one of our new logos, continuing the “kitchen” theme and including a whisk, to symbolize our desire to stir things up.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

Discussion

7 Thoughts on "A Look Back at 2016 and a Peek Forward at 2017"

I honestly don’t know why the top hit continues to get so many eyeballs except that it has the words “PLOS ONE” and “Impact Factor” in its title. My prediction was dead wrong and I don’t provide the journal’s current IF. I imagine that search engines are driving these hits and that readers are going away without what they came for. This is not a post that I’m particularly proud of.

Nine of our 21 top search engine terms used to come to the site are combinations of “plos one” and “impact factor”.

A data point as I finish my slides for our panel in Denver on Thursday! But I’d like to think that the analytics on #3 are solid. That’s my confirmation bias slide.

As a scholarly but non-university press publisher I read TSK religiously. Many posts are not of use or interest but many are and I have educated my think tank colleagues to take what is posted on TSK seriously. So I am writing to thank all of you and to alert you to my small slice of the scholarly publishing world. Thanks for a great job in 2016, please keep it up. Roy M Carlisle

Many thanks to all Scholarly Kitchen Chiefs. We indeed learn and gain a lot of useful information from the posts and discussions. Also, I’m very excited about the new design. Please keep the great work up.

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