Statistics journals exhibit lower impact factors and longer publication times than other fields
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Academic discussions and specialized studies document that statistics journals generally feature lower impact factors and longer publication times compared to journals in many other fields.
This article is motivated by the work as editor-in-chief of the Austrian Journal of Statistics and contains detailed analyses about the impact of the Austrian Journal of Statistics.
The impact of a journal is typically expressed by journal metrics indicators. One of the important ones, the journal impact factor is calculated from the Web of Science (WoS) database by Clarivate Analytics.
It is known that newly established journals or journals without membership in big publishers often face difficulties to be included, e.g., in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and thus they do not receive a WoS journal impact factor, as it is the case for example, for the Austrian Journal of Statistics.
In this study, a novel approach is pursued modeling and predicting the WoS impact factor of journals using open access or partly open-access databases, like Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Scopus. I hypothesize a functional linear dependency between citation counts in these databases and the journal impact factor. These functional relationships enable the development of a model that may allow estimating the impact factor for new, small, and independent journals not listed in SCI. However, only good results could be achieved with robust linear regression and well-chosen models.
In addition, this study demonstrates that the WoS impact factor of SCI listed journals can be successfully estimated without using the Web of Science database and therefore the dependency of researchers and institutions to this popular database can be minimized. These results suggest that the statistical model developed here can be well applied to predict the WoS impact factor using alternative open-access databases.
# Why do statistics journals generally have low impact factors, long publication times, and low acceptance rates?
Tags: publications, journals, statistics
- Score: 21
- Views: 9652
- Answers: 4
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: compbiostats (313 rep)
- Asked: 2024-01-30
- Edited: 2024-02-02
- Site: academia
## Question
I've been investigating statistics journals to submit my work to (specifically, an application paper). Many journals are specialized, others quite general.
However, I've noticed that top journals in the field (e.g., sub-journals of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS)) generally exhibit the above traits. In many cases, the impact factor is less than 2. In certain cases, the time from submission to publication is 1.5-2 years in duration. In the majority of cases, the acceptance rate is ~10% or lower. Some of the most celebrated contributions to statistics have been published in this way. This trend has been previously investigated by van Nierop (2009) for example (Title: Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?). Interestingly, the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) currently enjoys an impact factor of 3.7, but long times bet
s an IF based on citations during 5 years. Although the need for a cut‐off is understandable, we are unaware of the reasons for the cut‐offs after 5 years or, particularly, 2 years.
The rate at which articles are cited, known as the ‘speed of citation diffusion’, has been considered in studies of IF of statistical journals (Fok and Franses, 2007 , van Nierop 2009 ). Inspired by the citation diffusion hypothesis, we speculated that a combination of two phenomena might explain why some research areas, such as agronomy and entomology, have journals with low IF compared with, for instance, medical and pharmaceutical journals: (i) agronomy and entomology journals include fewer citations than medical and pharmaceutical journals; and (ii) citations in agronomy and entomology journals are older than citations in medical and pharmaceutical journals.
Initial evaluations of averages of all scientific journals in each of the seven research categories revealed that, in 2010, there were about six to seven times more scientific articles published in the areas of organic chemistry and pharmacology than in agronomy and entomology. There was a marked difference in the number of scientific articles per research category, and there was also an eight‐fold difference in the number of citations between the highest (pharmacology and pharmacy) and lowest (entomology) categories. Differences between categories with respect to the numbers of articles or citations are obviously driven by a wide range of factors, including the numbers of researchers and institutions conducting research in those areas, and the magnitude of available funding. As an example, applied field research in entomology or agronomy typically involves multi‐year datasets and publication is delayed accordingly. Seasons with adverse weather patterns or unforeseen logistical problems can prolong the data collection phase. Thus, data collection takes considerably longer than when feeding seniors hot chocolate for 30 days! Age a
Why do statistics journals have low impact factors? - Van Nierop - 2009 - Statistica Neerlandica - Wiley Online Library
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