In Academia, we have gotten used to dialogs like this one:
A- Look, that person over there, is very important, a genius.
B- Yes? Why?
A- Published in Science and Nature.
B- Ohh! And what about?
A- Have no idea …. But man! Science and Nature!... what a genius.
B- Yes…. What a genius.
The repercussion of a scientific idea, probably now more than ever, will depend on what journal the idea is published. It seems there are no alternatives. If you have a good idea, it must be published in a top-ranked journal. Otherwise, your idea, and you, are not perceived as good as you may think or deserve. Consciously or unconsciously, journals are perceived as something more relevant than the ideas they publish. They are perceived as labels of quality.
The higher the ranking of the journal you publish in, the better your idea (and you) will be celebrated by colleagues. That (weird, unjust, and even unethical) paradigm has been dominating the international scientific community for many years in Academia. But what is more important?: the journal, the idea, or the authors? There seems to be a great deal of confusion around that.
For many (most?) colleagues and institutions, counting the number of papers in top-ranked journals still is the best way to identify the best scientists that should be perceived as role models within the scientific community. Some weigh also the leading role of the authors in their papers, some weigh the number of citations received. But the critical factor seems to be always in what top-journal you have published and how many times you did it.
However, there are disciplines that seem to be outside this loop. Often, colleagues from the Social Sciences tell me they do not worry about international top-ranked journals as much as we (in Biological Sciences) do. I´m sure it doesn’t work the same in different countries, as I see some researchers from the Soc Sc frequently publishing in top-ranked journals.
So, do journals really determine what ideas will prevail over others? Is this problem properly addressed by the international scientific community? What alternatives do scientists have? Join the discussion and share your ideas!
In my perspective, I would say what counts in science is citations, as they mean your real impact. Of course, there is not a single factor that would determine your academic qualities, but quoting seems very important to me. Publishing in top journals raises your chances to get quoted, so it goes hand in hand with my idea, but it does not work the other way round — you may still be quoted even though you publish in locally important periodicals. The core is to take more indicators into account.
In principle, if and when all the parts and steps in this system are working well, publishing in the best journals should only be a hint that a given text should be worth reading. The ultimate scarcity is readers' time, not page space now that we have digital journals. Most journals have not enlarged the number of publications, although the number and diversity of journals is growing (good!). The notion of good researchers competing for space in a journal and trusted members of the scientific community filtering out which of the candidate texts are best very x-time is still the best we have (now being killed by online first, btw). In the conversation depicted as illustration, the two interlocutors obviously do not belong to the same discipline or research domain of the person they are talking about. Otherwise, they should know about her already. Such a conversation points more to social legitimacy of scientists than to disciplinary evaluation of quality. That is also a source of concern but, in my view, it is a different topic. Once you know a researcher and think her work is excellent, you read her wherever she publishes in.
On the other hand, we (scholars) should be focusing on alternatives to the publishing system, since not all parts and steps in the system are working well. In fact, problems are accumulating: gatekeeping while editing or refereeing, sloppy and nonconstructive refereeing, APCs, underrepresented research trends, bias towards positive results, generic journals having very different research efforts competing against each other, growing undetected plagiarism, article slicing, venue shopping, etc. In addition, we have let our universities and civil authorities turn research quality evaluation into quantitative heuristics based on indexes that have only fostered some of the problems above. Many proposals within the movement of Open Science, other than open access, can help redress some of these problems. Journals come and go, and the real concern is that universities are not providing for change, not funding new journals, not giving credit for refereeing, let alone training and recognition to editors. Some shy steps to fix this are in progress (e.g., in The Netherlands, journal indexes are not considered a quality indicators any longer).
However, the basic point is that the readers of scientific journals are expected to critically read each piece and have their own opinion, both on the piece and on the referees, the editors, and the journal that published it. No need to remind the Sokal scandal: we all have opinions on which journal is good, independently of indexes and percentiles. It is us who decide where to send an article, which journal to read. The system really stops working when you think that such distorted depictions of quality are the only criterion you should choose, when you prioritize such criteria over your own judgment, when you surrender you duty as scholar and let the managers run the show.
Apart from all this, Michal is right that personal citations and not journal citations are one of several good indicators.
Not all the research published in highly reputed journals are groundbreaking, likewise many cutting-edge research has been published in middle level journals too. Indeed, the research published in top-level journals add some value to them. For example, such publications may imply attributes like significance, technical accuracy, novelty, and so on, but they do not ensure whether the research has an exceptional impact on the society. Therefore, I do not believe that the factor called 'level/rank' of a journal could decide 'what research will prevail over others'.
Next, I think the 'reputation' and 'rank/citations' of journals are two different things. I have seen some highly reputed (I define this as well-known, acceptable, with right readership, and already published good research) journals in my field, but without a high impact factor (or say 'rank'). In fact, the number of citations someone receives may depend on multiple factors apart from the characteristics of the research. Therefore, I am not sure whether it is good to judge the importance of a research merely based on the rank where it was published.
I'm probably misquoting, but this brings to mind for me something Wittgenstein said, I guess, to a student/colleague: 'we have to make our own oxygen'. For me, someone who has been in this game for a while, this means that my main goal is to be happy with my own work and not to worry about exactly where it is published. Sure, there is pleasure in getting in a top journal, but sometimes I'm equally proud of work that appears in local-small outlets. If you ever re-read your own work several years after publication, isn't it important that we don't cringe about what we have said, ie. we made an argument/contribution that still stands, or at least makes reasonable sense?
I agree entirely with you Mike Lloyd . An equally great quote comes (independently) from two of my dearest former professors (JM "Lobo" Orensanz and J Carlton) and it goes approximately like this: "every time I am asked for my dearest own article, it turns out to be one published in an obscure journal rather than one published in a shiny top one." This is huge, coming from people who have published a lot, including many top journals. However, those hidden articles are the hardest to find, either by chance or by using keywords and authors' names. Ironically, unless you ask the author as I did with my professors, you´ll probably never know about those articles. In the end, it is our (every scientist's) responsibility to find the hidden important articles instead of choosing the easy way and read/cite only those appearing in top journals' alerts, for instance...
Gracias everybody for your input!
Below you´ll find a note supporting Ricardo Muñoz Martín 's good reasoning:
Article Impact factor abandoned by Dutch university in hiring and pr...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01759-5
Mike Lloyd I fully agree. I think in CVs more emphasis should be put to, say, stating your top five scientific findings instead of your top five papers. In former times people published one or two papers a year, so it was easy to identify the paper with the scientific idea, but nowadays everything is so fragmented that you cannot look through. If things continues like this, we will end up with AI-based programs that will evaluate our work. Maybe this also would be a change for the better, because it would, e.g., be a way to differentiate between a simply mentioning citation or a praising or dissaproving one. First steps in this direction were already taken.
yes, and so does the rank of of University you end up working at. I've worked at ranks 1 - 4,000 and couldn't find a iota of difference in the intellect of the people I met at those places (students included). The only difference is that the money flows to the top.
Even so called top journals publish erroneous or fake data so they are not all that great
When I was young, reviewers (old scientists) encourage me to publish new ideas and discuss the quality in public. Later some (?) reviewers asked me to cite their (group) published reports. Establishes are trying to keep their superiority. These are not fair demands. Therefore, the question is the quality of reviewers. We are not sure about discoveries; however, reviewers should share the risk. There are many uncertain phenomena. We have to challenge ourselves to find the answers. Hoping the young generation should challenge old guards for the future of human beings. Remember our blue planet has a limited age. At present, a possible new house is far away even we can ride a light-speed rocket.
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