This should be our last post of the year for 2018 (unless something urgent comes up over the holidays). With things shutting down for the end of the year, it’s a good time to look back on 2018 a year in which we celebrated our 10th anniversary in The Scholarly Kitchen.

New Year 2019 replace 2018 on the beach

This year we added new “Chefs” Lisa Hinchliffe, who has been instrumental in helping us better represent the library community, and Jasmine Wallace, who, aside from her own regular posts, will hopefully help us pull in more educational material about scholarly communications. One of our big focuses for the year was to increase the diversity of viewpoints presented in The Kitchen, in as many ways as we could. To this end, we put out a call for guest posts, and in 2018 published 45 posts by guest authors (18% of our content, including our most read post for the year), along with 11 interview posts (4.4%), more than in any previous year.

Diversity, inclusion, and equity were major themes this year, as the scholarly communication community took a hard, but necessary look inward to see where we are falling short. I’m thrilled that The Kitchen has taken a leadership role in these areas (through the hard work of several of our Chefs) and become a welcoming place for all to voice their struggles and ideas about how we can do better. Those voices are being heard, and I’m really happy to see several of these posts in our most read list below.

We published 249 posts this year, which inspired 3,644 comments (up from 2,888 last year). As of this writing (December 18), the site saw 1,544,117 pageviews, a 12.4% increase over 2017. We had 695,868 visitors, a surprising 19% increase over last year. Our readership is predominantly in the US (just over 50% of views) and the UK (16%).

Our most read posts during 2018 were as follows:

  1. Sci-Hub: How Does it Work?
  2. Cabell’s New Predatory Journal Blacklist: A Review
  3. Guest Post: Think Sci-Hub is Just Downloading PDFs? Think Again
  4. Scientific Reports Overtakes PLOS ONE as Largest Megajournal
  5. A New Citation Database Launches Today: Digital Science’s Dimensions
  6. Impact Factor Denied to 20 Journals for Self-Citation, Stacking
  7. On Being Excluded: Testimonies by People of Color in Scholarly Publishing
  8. A Confusion of Journals: What is PubMed Now?
  9. Breaking the Silence: the #MeToo Moment in Scholarly Communications
  10. Why Elsevier is a Library’s Best Friend

If we limit the most-read list to posts that were published in 2018, our top posts for the year are as follows:

  1. Guest Post: Think Sci-Hub is Just Downloading PDFs? Think Again
  2. A New Citation Database Launches Today: Digital Science’s Dimensions
  3. Impact Factor Denied to 20 Journals for Self-Citation, Stacking
  4. On Being Excluded: Testimonies by People of Color in Scholarly Publishing
  5. Breaking the Silence: the #MeToo Moment in Scholarly Communications
  6. Why Elsevier is a Library’s Best Friend
  7. Guest Post: The Problem with Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity
  8. Do You Have Concerns about Plan S? Then You Must be an Irresponsible, Privileged, Conspiratorial Hypocrite
  9. Focusing on Value – 102 Things Journal Publishers Do (2018 Update)
  10. Journals Lose Citations to Preprint Servers

Search Engines were our most common referrer (23%), with Twitter a distant second (4%) and Facebook an even more distant third (1.2%).

Lifetime, this year we passed the 10 million mark for pageviews (currently 10,833,803).

We’ll start up the new year on January 2, so until then, thanks to all the Chefs for their hard work, thanks to all who contributed a guest post or sat for an interview (and keep them coming – we want to hear your voice in The Kitchen!), and of course, thanks to all of you for reading and sharing your thoughts with us. See you next year.

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

5 Thoughts on "The Year in Review: 2018 On The Scholarly Kitchen"

Thanks to all the Chefs for their contributions in 2018. I enjoy reading your daily posts – they’re informative, thought provoking and just the right length. Enjoy the holidays, and I look forward to reading more of your posts in 2019.

May I join in with Heather – and undoubtedly others – on congratulating you for a job well done! It is always (well nearly always) a pleasure to read a post from you!

Well done, Chefs! Thank you for contributing such educational and interesting content to our community. I hope you keep up the good work–looking forward to 2019!
Cheers,
Scott (a new reader)

Congratulations in a very successful 2018. The Chefs and guest posts contributed to many exciting ideas and opinions. Bashar H. Malkawi

The Scholarly Kitchen is one of my main resources for staying up to date with the scholarly publishing world and linking it to my everyday interactions with authors.

All this is thanks to you, the time and effort you put in parallel to your daily responsibilities.

Wishing you a fruitful 2019 and look forward to coming across more articles or guest posts around authors/reviewers/editors (global or for specific fields) in addition to the usual landscape/solutions contributions.

All the best!

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