Activity of authors of Nature Precedings articles
Santosh Patnaik
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 09:23 UTC
How productive (active) are the authors who have published manuscripts in Nature Precedings?
Here’s an analysis done by counting the number of abstracts returned in PubMed searches using authors’ full names. The result indicates that well-published authors are publishing in Nature Precedings.
The graphic result can be seen here.
- Manuscripts that covered subjects not covered by PubMed were excluded.
- Only first, second or last authors were considered.
- Author names were converted to the format ‘First_name Last_name’; middle names/initials were removed.
- Authors with names with only initials for first names, or those using non-English alphabet characters were not considered.
- Nature Precedings metadata was acquired using OAI-PMH. PHP code was used to generate the filtered list of authors and for querying PubMed using Entrez Programming Utilities.
— 236 manuscripts
— 1166 authors
— 1007 unique author names
— 528 unique first, second or last author names
— 16 author names returned more than 200 abstracts each, likely because names like ‘Wei Zhang’ are common. The sixteen does have names like ‘Nicholas White’ and ‘Robert Williams’ as well.
Updated 18 June 2008 20:23 UTC
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Replies
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Santosh, if I can be so bold as to make more work for you, I think that this would be even more meaningful if you could directly compare the Precedings distribution with a similar type of analysis for actual post-peer-reviewed publications. Perhaps comparing how prolific PLoS ONE authors are, or even examining the distribution for authors publishing in a “high impact” journal like Nature Medicine. How would these distributions compare to the Precedings distribution?
It would be difficult because the ‘N’ is so different for those other journals (over the past year, PLoS ONE has published many times the number of Precedings articles, while the Nature Medicine total is probably much lower).
In my opinion, this type of distribution comparison would better address your interesting question of whether Precedings authors are ‘productive’, at least when compared to those authors publishing in various other venues.
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I did think of using randomly-picked author populations for papers published in traditional journals over the last year to do the same kind of analysis. But then the whole exercise becomes too serious and big.
One has to properly identify the journals — subject-specific/general, low/average impact factor, etc. — to use, and so on. It’d yield interesting data by itself, not just when compared with the observations for Nature Precedings.
The little analysis I describe is really informal. Considering the methodology and the caveats, the numbers mentioned are not exactly true, though the overall impression that authors publishing in Nature Precedings appear to be ‘typical’ authors/scientists is likely correct.
I used the term ‘productive’ to convey activity but not prolificacy, creativity, significance, etc.
I guess my main objective was to check the acceptance of the journal among ‘main-stream’ scientists publishing in Nature Precedings. That in turn indicates the citability of the articles and the motivation for others to publish. These are also important determinants of the journal’s future prospects.
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