More and more studies are emerging showing how misdirecting and expanding citations can lead to long-term misconceptions and mistaken belief systems in the sciences.
Long “Instructions to Authors” filled with ancillary policies and undifferentiated requirements don’t help authors, staff, or editors. As the graveyard for unmade decisions, they’ve only gotten longer and more opaque. Maybe it’s time to clean yours up!
The lack of an Impact Factor is one reason that new journals have difficulty attracting submissions. Some journals, such as eLife and Cell Reports, qualify for an Impact Factor based on partial data. This post explores how that happens.
There is a rumor, based on no or scant evidence, that Google is preparing to launch a platform for scholarly communications, which could threaten established STM publishers. A publisher should react to this by reviewing its own internal operations and value proposition. In particular, the role in certification should be strengthened.
HBO’s John Oliver offers a numerically representative debate about climate change. While he accurately skewers how the media presents science, this “majority rules” approach may not be the best way to judge what’s right or wrong.
The DOAJ is kicking out hundreds of predatory and scam publishers that found their way into the directory, and tightening standards to ensure that they don’t sneak back in. Which makes things a bit awkward for a community that, for years, has been insisting that predatory OA publishing isn’t a problem worth worrying about.
Google recently disclosed that they give Web sites higher ranking if they are encrypted. This is but one example of how Google serves as a gatekeeper of the Internet, making cultural decisions in the name of technological elegance.
Attempts to use new measurements to more finely predict or represent journal quality are bound to falter because of some qualities inherent to journals themselves.
Could a Kindle Unlimited subscription replace your local library? What can scholarly publishers learn from Amazon’s tactics here?
In 2004, two journalists imagined the impact of social participation would have on the news media.
Yesterday saw the release of the 2013 Impact Factors for scholarly journals. We present a look back at some favorite posts examining the Impact Factor.
A recent “Slate” article shows what can go wrong when we talk about “peer review” as if we all share a common definition about an unchanging phenomenon.
Over the past three decades, the research library has been receiving a smaller proportion of the university budget. Does this trend reflect the failure of library administrators and the declining relevance of libraries? Or does it tell the story of self-control and growing efficiency against a backdrop of spiraling higher education costs?
The Authors Guild’s lawsuit against HathiTrust over the latter’s massive library of digitized print books has been dismissed by the Second Circuit Court. What does this mean for libraries, authors, and readers?
A paper claiming to have identified “the 1%” in productive published researchers may suffer from problems with disambiguation, timing, and scope.