Naturally, a large percentage of manuscripts submitted to the 'big' journals in the Earth sciences, Nature and Science, are rejected. This leaves authors with an option to submit their work to 'related' journals, i.e., Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications; or Science Advances, respectively.
I'd like to know about your feeling about publishing in these 'second-order' journals. Since they carry the prominent publisher labels of Nature and Science, do you think they are equally visible and prestigious, and maybe just a different platform to present your research? Or does it leave you with the feeling of having to settle for a '2nd-class' article in comparison to a paper in Nature or Science? Your opinions and thoughts would be much appreciated.
To give this a quantitative measure, here are the current (2014) impact factors for some of the leading geoscientific journals (released in 2015):
Nature: 41.456
Nature Geoscience: 11.74
Nature Communications: 11.47
Science: 33.611
Science Advances: Debut 2015; impact factor announced 2017
PNAS: 9.674
Geology: 4.88
Thanks,
Martin
The irony is, the very journals, or for that matter the editorial ELITES, take pride in the proportion of rejections!
Needless to say the bias and discrimination under the garb of protecting scientific quality!!
Dear Dr. Towe & Dr. Keiter,
Many thanks for your answers. I am surprised to find 4 of them already. My question does not really relate to any of my current manuscripts; I am just trying to get a more "general feeling" of what other fellow scientists, preferably more senior ones, think of what has become a somewhat hierarchic and complex publication system behind Nature and Science. I agree, it is certainly most essential to get your research disseminated, and in my own experience the "smaller" (but more specialized) journals (e.g., "Meteoritics & Planetary Science", if one works in the field of meteorites and/or impact craters) are a very good way to reach the highest possible number of experts in that particular field. Also, there is generally no problem to get a good media release out when an interesting new article has been published in this type of journal (in fact, this in turn helps the journal being more visible, more cited, and in increasing its impact factor eventually). Usually, these journals also allow for much more research details than a ~2-4-page article (commonly with large supplementary online files) in one of the "big" journals. Unfortunately, and this is related to my second, previous, question here on RG, the latter papers - of course, with eye-catching titles - are likely the ones that seem to matter most to hiring committees and funding agencies.
This also relates to the question: what is more valuable in the academic track record? Being the 29th co-author in two Science papers (which gives you some ~67 "impact points"), or the lead author of a few articles in smaller, specialized journals (adding up to maybe some ~12 impact points)? By measuring the plain impact factor numerics (which weighs each author equally per publication, at least here in RG; and in terms of an author's citation index, too), there is a simple answer - this system favors those who are part of big science/mission teams that produce >>1 Nature & Science papers per year, collectively.
Regarding your statement, Dr. Keiter - I agree; a smaller journal can have a number of high-quality and highly cited papers; and I know of some hypotheses published in Nature and Science that have been proven "invalid". That's just the nature of the beast, but first and foremost it promotes the gain of knowledge.
So far, I can say I have never had the impression that my manuscript submissions were "mis-handled" by "elite" Editors just for the sake of rejection. It's the normal business, nsubmissions > narticles printed. You try one journal; sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't, and then you try to find the next-best target journal, until you got your research published.
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