Good Question!

 But the same happens to those of us who produce stuff in temperate climates: " not of sufficiently general or theoretical interest" for us (often not said outright, but implied) is a common response. The problem lies with the way the authorities judge merit, via the ISI citation index. Careers and choice of journal is often driven by this. I think your approach: go to Journals which are directly relevant to your work and region, is exactly right. And all of us who do not have to worry about career or the next grant should do our best to put good stuff into specialist journals, hopefully enhancing their status at the expense of journals that pride themselves on high rejection rates

I think the answer is impact factor or related factors.  Many researchers are working toward tenure or need to show high citations to their work.  While some of the tropical regional journals are high quality and highly accessible most are not.  A number of the regional journals are not even available on line or are not accessible to universities worldwide. 

 I'm semi-retired so have the luxury of ignoring impact factors, but my younger colleagues don't have that choice because university administrators and other gatekeepers have become obsessed with supposedly "objective" indicators of "quality." It's perverse, unfair, and stupid, but it's reality.

I second most of what has been said, but I will offer the following additional thought. Many journals have long standing pedigrees and have garnered a reputation for a desirable place to publish.  I don't care where you do your research, but if an exciting outcome (a "eureka" moment) occurs, the first two journals you are likely to think of are Science and Nature.  No more, no less.

I too agree with Michael P Weinstein

Robert Cameron & Will Reeves have answered the question.  KPIs & promotion criteria require ISI citation, impact factor, the upper Qs, etc.. When it comes to good studies with interesting outcomes, as Michael Weinstein mention, we want it in in the top journals; not for KPI or promotion, we want to share with more & to be known.  Only when the study is a simple one we consider the local or regional journals.  Published an article in a Q1 journal, & almost everyday I get an invitation to write a research or review article for one of the high ranking journals. 

In a competitive academic world researchers will inevitably target  journals of appropriate standard that have the greatest influence in their respective disciplines. Influence of a given journal in its discipline is primarily judged from the frequency with which articles that are published in the journal are cited by other researchers in current literature. Journal quality is further appraised based on a worldwide distribution; a global readership; adherence to international editorial conventions that optimize the retrieval of source articles; aims including a broad and extensive coverage of the entire scope of the discipline or sub discipline it specializes in with contributions that are scientific and showing methodological innovation and refinement. Unfortunately it is by and large the established journals from temperate areas that meet most of these stringent criteria while many regional publications from tropical regions get tainted by the proliferation of predatory journals of extremely suspect quality.  

I would add one other thing: Many studies, tropical or otherwise, involve detailed taxonomic work, or report on large data sets which will be very useful to later workers. These papers have a long half-life, i.e. they are cited many years after their publication. Again, we need to keep up what pressure we can to get this aspect of citation metrics respected. Taxonomic work, an essential in tropical regions especially, suffers badly from the whole citation index circus.

While I agree that major theoretical innovations or sensational results can be pushed towards Nature or Science (or the American Naturalist), most of us operate at a lower, bread and butter level. Without that, the science would be devoid of content.

Bob

A few thoughts on content.  Among the service provided by the "bread and butter" publications are verification of  the results of earlier studies, application(s) of findings (the content of applied science), and what is sometimes referred to as "technology transfer"; i.e., case histories, perspective articles, reviews etc. and other practical uses. The Stokes  quadrant model may be useful here, basic research (e.g., Bohr); applied research (e.g., Edison); use inspired research (e.g. Pasteur),  etc.  Combined with the rapid rate of expansion of research in virtually all fields, a plethora of journals can be supported, including more journals in the tropics.  Some of you folks should get together and create more of these like Biotropica, etc.  I've published in the latter.

PS - you mention American Naturalist; perhaps an example of the type I am talking about, would be the American Midland Naturalist as an applied "companion".

Mike Weinstein 

It is really sad bow the impact factor industry killed the science; however the expansion of a lot of new journals is getting strong and the best thing that happened is that thomson created the expanded database (i.e. includes practically every journal). On this scenario in a near future, it is very possible that Impact Factor is not the matter, and then is the time for a change. Anyway the problem is basically that people believe that only "good papers" are published in "good journals", which is far to be true. If you want to do something about that; better thing is to send very good papers to local journals, and having empirical data supporting that any journal can have nice works. 

Eduardo

I am a coastal ecologist with expertise in fisheries and wetlands, but of the old guard. I've published my share of peer-reviewed articles.  Well before there were impact factors, the list of the most desirable journals for me and my colleagues was about the same as today - Science, Nature, PNAS, American Naturalist, Ecology, Ann. Rev of Ecology & Systematics; P. Royal Soc. London, CJFAS; L&O, TAFS come to mind, and many others.  The good journals established their reputations for excellence many years ago!  We tend to save our best stuff for these.   Regards,

Mike 

That's true however years ago you don't have as many publishing options as today; and the whole market situation (i.e. granting, publishing costs, etc.) was different. Additionally there was a visibility factor, that today with open access and internet is totally different. In other words, you may see no significant changes in Journal selection or preference; but the reasons of these selections are not the same

 Sorry if I keep banging on about this, but Tan has raised an issue  that in a more general way is close to my heart.. Y es, there are more journals around now, and certainly more researchers. Open access is certainly a game-changer, but it has side effects, like all changes. As a retired researcher, and as a person working in a continuing education facility rather than a biology dept, I have never had access to grants etc to pay publication costs, so I have depended on the traditional subscription journals to get my work published. I worry that  if open access becomes the rule, oddballs like me will be excluded. Also, wearing an editorial and reviewer's hat, i wonder if ability to pay rather than scientific merit will determine publication. The small specialist journals I work for have robust reviewing and editorial standards. The science in them may have a limited frame of reference, but it will have been checked out.

Papers that are data rich, but do not set out to test a particular hypothesis fare particularly badly. A very eminent colleague who does get stuff into top journals admitted that the hypothesis presented is often derived post hoc, just to make things look sexy enough. I don't have the means to check, but I suspect that many papers cited heavily and immediately drop out of the scene in quite a short time.

One reason is that these publications are always presented to the wrong audience! The grass-root people have always been the ones impacted upon or the 'problem' population normally used as 'targets' but rarely thought about in terms of accountability. Presentations (and later less implementation) are done to the approval of awarding institutions not the area of study! I discovered that there is a lot of information published and exchanged here. And it is regarded very expensive to disseminate this information to those developing tropical areas. Expensive knowledge later translates into no knowledge!

Belonging to this forum of RESEARCH GATE is a dream to some us from the developing world! Could you develop a link of making these scientific scripts into ready-to-use and implementable protocols. Two cents..

At the end of the day it is the impact factor and H index story... which, I think, are very toxic for the whole scientific community on the long term.

This is a very good question !

I would like to imagine a situation like the following :

A "eureka " type of finding is published in a so called obscure journal.

Will the discovery remain in the domain of obscurity ?

Ashis

Unfortunately, I suggest that this has an extremely low likelihood of happening.

I can tell a little history about that; I'm editor of a relatively new journal (free open access) which started in 2009; I put there one of my most nice findings which change completely what we knew about a whole family. I decided to put that in the new journal; in one of the first issues it got accepted, no reputation in the journal obviously. Four years latter, in a very big meeting (a quaddrenial meeting of our Heteroptersits society), when any person saw my name tag told me "Oh!! you published that nice paper on color changes and maternal care in Acanthosomatids", So I believe open access may take the world if we help a little bit

Development of research and research quality may have an impact on this. I believe that penetration of research is not that deep in tropical countries, that means that journals in these countries are less likely to get as many citations as journals in temperate world do. Much of research in tropical countries is either concerned with extremely local issues, or is not able to provide a broader vision of those issues, therefore articles in these journals are less likely to be cited internationally. However, things are changing fast and soon the things will be shoulder to shoulder.

This attitude should not be among researchers, if it does, then it is a "colored eye syndrome".

Local researches should be more published and cherished for development of the society.

Please excuse me for saying that the "business" of publication has some unscientific aspects. Refusal of publishing papers, on grounds of coming from certain regions in specific journals, is unfair. The much publicized impact factor cannot be claimed to be perfect. Citations have been turned into a game in many cases.

All in all, if there is good research then my advice is to publish it in any "reasonable" journal. Leave those who reject publishing your work & move ahead to those who will accept. I do not think that the current situation will keep on "static".

Dear Prof. Weinstein,

I do agree with you. The probability of such a situation to arise is, unfortunately low. But some time some where the change in attitude has to begin. 

I think this is a good option to start own Journals, provided quality is maintained.

Researchers should be aware not fall prey to publishing houses on account of impact factor, to make more money using your work..

Analogous to direct marketing (Manufacturer -to- Customer); RG is more a viable reach to researchers, for an enabled qualitative platform and good networking tool

In my RG profile you may notice that much of my research in Africa is published in "African" journals and some of my work in Italy in an Italian Journal, although my passport (not residency) is from a European (temperate) country. However, Africa is not necessarily equivalent to  tropics and Italy is neither tropical nor temperate (but Mediterranean). In other words we may need to define terminology (tropical versus temperate, high versus mid/low income country or low versus high numbers of researchers?). My African articles are downloaded largely from the USA, China, Europe and only rarely by Africans. Africans rarely download my European papers either.

In contrast to some of the preceding stories, one of our manuscripts on elephant was rejected by a low impact African journal to be excepted subsequently by a higher impact journal based in the EU. Similarly, my bear manuscript (about 500 downloads on RG and another 500 views in their journal) was rejected by a low impact specialist bear journal to be excepted by higher impact international journal. Same for our Ibis paper. Maybe acceptance or rejection of a manuscript is more of a casino or luck. Another hypothesis would be that many journals represent a network of insiders that exclude outsiders, certainly those challenging the Platzhirsch (top dog) or current paradigm of the scientific discipline.

Anyhow, the name of the game for low impact journals is to up their impact. At least two African journals fail to check whether submitted manuscripts cite relevant articles in the journal. An easy way to increase the number of citations is to explicitly prescribe in the revision letter to check the previous issues of the journal for relevant articles and check for compliance.

It is a good question.

This is because many young researchers, who need to publish their research in order to find a good job later, require impact factors of journals. It also happens that many senior researchers and university professors have to compete for projects to fund their research, and they need the impact factors of the journals to win these private or government funds. The impact factors of the journals have become a gauge of the research quality, and it should not happen because the journal impact factors were not created for that. However, in many countries things work that way.

Best regard.

 I do agree with you Prof. Hassan. We have a general tendency to behave too critically towards our own research. This is one of the major reasons for rejection of our manuscripts by our own journals.

I personally know the authors of a manuscript , which was rejected by a Journal published from Indian Subcontinent. The same manuscript was accepted without any further revision by a high impact Journal published from the West. 

Ashis

Would you share the name of the journal where it was published?  Thanks

I see this question now has 56 followers, which suggests quite a lot of interest and also, I suspect, a high degree of dissatisfaction with the way the world of scientific publications works. I wonder if we should start a more general discussion, not, I fear, with much hope of having any immediate impact, but perhaps flushing out the views of those who think the system is fine and dandy, thank you very much. At least we could see the justifications offered for the status quo, rather than the usual shrug of the shoulders and a cynical view that this is the way things are, and you had better accept it.

I am going to be away and not responding to anything for a fortnight beginning on Monday, but I would be interested to see what response there is when I return.

Sounds good; maybe starting a forum in a journal!

An esteemed colleague of mine in reference to grants and manuscripts described it ever so  succinctly:  "it's all a crap shoot"! 

I fully agree with Tan that researchers in the tropical countries should publish their research in journals of  tropical region & also in their own countries . Data on problems on various aspects in tropical countries are inadequate & solutions have to be found locally . Papers being rejected due to regional interest is loss of good scientific data , which would be relevant to concerned nations . The pressure to publish in high impact journals is definitely a factor , but it is essential that these articles are published in local journals , if rejected by them . Many of the local journals are available online & a valuable scientific contribution would make an impact to society in the relevant countries . It should be realized by researchers that the volume of genuine scientific work is very large & all these cannot be published only in high impact journals .

Lack of an impact factor discourages one to submit to local journals

I know this is tough, and perhaps unfair advice from one who is retired, and does not need to give a monkey's about impact factor (except for my younger co-authors). Publish in the journal that is relevant to your field, that will be read by the people who have a genuine interest, the editors of which you trust.  If we collectively ignore the pressure exerted by the (entirely commercial)Thompson/Reuters Index, we will eventually persuade our bosses/funding agencies that some one has actually got to assess the quality of our work by reading it, rather than relying on an indicator that was not designed for this purpose..

Simple, impact factor. You have to demonstrate you are doing high quality research by putting  your work in good impact journals.

Dear S. G. Tan

I agree with Robert A D Cameron

With my Best wishes

One reason may be that a large number of journals in the tropics have been branded as predatory; this means that researchers will not be attracted to publish in these journals.