Acceptance in Top Journals Shows Large Disparities across Name-inferred Ethnicities

Publishing in top journals is crucial to academic careers, but many fields show substantial ethnic disparities in publication counts, which may be caused by disparities in producing manuscripts or getting them accepted. Here, we investigate the latter mechanism using the peer review files of 16.5K manuscripts submitted between 2013-2018 to a field-leading biology journal (Journal A) and a middle-tier journal of similar scope (Journal B). The editorial data are supplemented with authors’ name-inferred ethnicities and extensive controls including submissions’ topic, author prestige, and citation impact, even for rejected-and-published-elsewhere submissions. We find substantial disparities in acceptance across inferred ethnicities and that these are driven by the editors and not peer reviewers. In particular, for a given amount of future impact and other submission characteristics, papers by East Asian-named authors were 4.3-14.6 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those by British-origin-named authors. Journal A editors were about 7.1-8.1 percentage points less likely to send East Asian-authored (Chinese and non-Chinese) papers out for peer review and, for a given level of reviewer enthusiasm, 7.2 percentage points less likely to ultimately accept them (non-Chinese only). In contrast, peer reviewers gave recommendations that were similar across all name-inferred ethnicities. As science continues to globalize, these findings signal the need to better understand ethnic disparities in the review process.

Publish-or-Perish Propagates Scientific Malpractice and Neglect

Globally, there is an increase in academic interest. Student enrollment in universities are skyrocketing, suggesting an increased need to hold academic degrees. However, the mass increase in awarded PhDs with the stagnant number of faculty positions is causing a major strain in the academic hiring process. The result of this disparity is a necessary shift from holistically considering each scientist to briefly considering a subset of applicant metrics, for example publication counts. The increased emphasis of publication count metrics in hiring has led to the expression publish-or-perish. The publish-or-perish architecture shifts the focus of scientists away from meticulous scientific practices and contributions to society in order to ensure that they are outputting as many publications as possible. I here consider how the increased strain on the academic architecture is detrimental for faculty applicants and how it is propagating scientific malpractice and neglect.

Research diversification and its relationship with publication counts and impact: A case study based on Australian professors

This research aims to investigate whether multi/inter-disciplinary research activities are related to research impact and publication counts of scholars. Since researchers with very high levels of multi/inter-disciplinarity might be able to target complex problems, we would expect them to receive more credits than their colleagues with a stronger disciplinary orientation. We analysed Web of Science (WoS) indexed publications of all associate and full professors from a random sample of Australian universities in physics, chemistry and biology (1980–2014). Australian Fields of Research (FoR) codes assigned to journals were used to calculate the diversification of authors’ publications. The number of citations in the first 3 years, number of 10% most frequently cited papers, and citation impact percentile were used for impact assessment. A few indicators were used to measure the diversity including ‘extent of diversification (ED)’ (number of distinct FoR codes divided by the number of publications) and ‘diversification ratio (DR)’ (ratio of the publications falling outside the dominant code to the total number of publications). A total of 47.76% of biologists’ publications, 35.23% of physicists’ publications and 20.36% of chemists’ publications were published in journals assigned to fields other than the Australian associate and full professors’ fields. Publications from biologists had the largest values of diversification. Women (compared with men) and associate professors (compared with full professors) in chemistry, biology and overall were more probably to publish diversely. ED was negatively correlated with output and citation impact. DR also had a negative but weak correlation with the number of publications and 10% most frequently cited paper.

Almát a körtével? Tudománymetriai összehasonlítások szakterületek között

It is well known that all scientometric indicators strongly depend on research fields. Therefore, there is a certain reluctance to make any cross-field comparison of these indicators. The paper reviews the possibilities to normalize the most important scientometric indicators: publication counts, citation rate or h-index, thus making them suitable for cross-field comparison. Orv. Hetil., 2016, 157(16), 631–634.

A citation-based, author- and age-normalized, logarithmic index for evaluation of individual researchers independently of publication counts

The use of citation metrics for evaluation of individual researchers has dramatically increased over the last decade. However, currently existing indices either are based on misleading premises or are cumbersome to implement. This leads to poor assessment of researchers and creates dangerous trends in science, such as overproduction of low quality articles. Here we propose an index (namely, the L-index) that does not depend on the number of publications, accounts for different co-author contributions and age of publications, and scales from 0.0 to 9.9. Moreover, it can be calculated with the help of freely available software.