I don’t even know what I’m going to talk about in this post.
Occasionally I would hear some Chinese scientists complaining that the western reviewers rejected their paper for some reasons before agreeing another paper describing almost the same work by a western author. But most of the time I tend to believe that the Chinese paper must be in fact somewhere weaker than the western paper, that the reviewers must be as objective as they can, that one or two papers’ being killed won’t stop a really important and productive research direction, that there is too large a population of nationalists in China who attribute every failure to racism. Even if there were indeed some cases of racism in the peer-review process, it should not be suitable to discuss here.
But another problem still exist – why we have to submit our works to ACS, RSC, John Wiley journals? To J. American Chem. Soc., Chem. European J., or Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.? I don’t know the situation of other English-speaking countries like Canada or Australia. I do know two of their journals: Can. J. Chem., Aust. J. Chem., but I seldom encounter papers from these journals. One exception is Aust. J. Chem. 1976, 29, 1, the fist paper describing the measurement of the critical micelle concentration (CMC) by fluorescent probes. But I know very great chemists from this two countries: Frank Caruso from Australia, known by his contribution in layer-by-layer assembly and polymeric nanotechnology, and Ian Manners from Canada, known by the synthesis of a novel polymer, poly(ferrocenylsilan), and the (great) block co-micelle formed thereof. I knew their works from such journals as JACS, Macromolecules, Nano Lett. or Adv. Mater. Why weren’t their works cited as papers on Aust. J. Chem. or Can. J. Chem.? Why didn’t they submit their works to these journals? Or, though less likely the case, why these journals rejected their paper if they were once submitted?
The recently released 2007 SCI impact factor reported that Aust. J. Chem. have reached 2.36, and Can. J. Chem. 1.204. Although much higher than I expected (I thought they are somewhere around 0.2), these numbers are still much smaller compared with those of Macromolecules (4.411), JACS (7.885), Adv. Mater. (8.191) or even Nano Lett. (9.627), which Caruso and Manners’s works were mainly published. Is IF the main reason of choice?
When it comes to national discrepancy, there is a little more to aware. For instance I read papers on Polym. J. (1.421), Chem. Lett. (1.48) and Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn.(?) from time to time. Obviously, papers on these journals are cited more frequently than Aust. J. Chem. or Can. J. Chem., with, however, lower IFs. Of course, good works on these journals are mostly submitted by Japanese scientists. Few western scientists would submit what could otherwise be well accepted by Chem. Eur. J. or Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. to Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. This may indicate that the success of a regional journal depends on three factors: 1) an English version, 2) indexed by SCI and 3) supported by scientists of its own country, and the third factor becomes very decisive if the first two are met, considering the examples of Aust. J. Chem. and Can. J. Chem., and – better – examples of Chinese journals. If you are a reviewer of an international journal and you find 50% of Chinese papers submitted to your journal are junks, possibly you can also imagine 99% of Chinese paper submitted to Chinese journals are junks, making these Chinese journals themselves junks (some IF data: Chinese J. Chem. 0.719, Chinese Chem. Lett. 0.336, Chinese J. Polym. Sci. 0.753, where J. is Junks for short). Obviously we don’t like reading junk papers, and one of the simplest way to avoid this is not reading junk journals. Therefore no one read The Chinese Junks of Anything and no one cite them. Similarly, maybe quite some people read Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. or Polym. J. so people cite them and know them.
But why this is a problem? Why it is not enough for a good work to appear in Chinese Junks of Chemistry, if the paper itself is not a junk? Why we have to have our own Chinese Journal of Something if there have been a full IF gradient of western journals to choose? What’s so different if any paper is equally available online be it on JACS or Chinese J. Chem.? I can’t think of any other reasons than impact factor.
The discussion on Publish and/or Perish is informative enough to answer these questions in detail:
But I highly recommend you the interview by ISI Essential Science Indicators with Ken Seddon, the most-cited scientist of the topic Ionic Liquid, where a successful art of balance between (not) publishing and (not) perishing was displayed.
I guess a lot of the problem is that journals have to build up a reputation. For “local” journals, this can be more difficult, because of the perception that they are serving a local audience.
I think quite a bit can be done by the editor to raise the profile of the journal – having special issues, inviting well known people to write papers etc. That way, authors will be more willing to submit to a journal. The key is probably to attract foreign scientists to submit – that way the journal becomes seen as international, and so will be read internationally.
I think impact factors are less importanty than you might imagine in terms of publication profile. These days, with searc engines such as google scholar, scopus, web of science etc. It is relatively easy to track down work of interest in a given area. It is then little effort to download the article, if your library service has the appropriate subscription. Scientists are increasingly searching by topic rather than journal title. Remeber that just because a journal has a high impact factor does not mean your article will be highly cited.
Brian: I know what you mean. IFs are indeed less important when we consider the quality of a journal or paper, but they are still important, as I wanted to imply in my post, when people choose a journal to submit their works, esp. original, important and new works, which I believe should be needless if there’s no other factor governing the choice.
Bob: Your comment is very informative. Certainly there are things for editors to do to boost up the journal’s reputation, IF, or to be serious, quality. This is true for any journal. One of my questions is why, not how, China needs its own, high impact journals, if it makes no different where to publish?
I would be interested for a journal to publish where it’s papers come from (i.e. nation)vs. number submitted from a particular region. I know this is a crude metric, but would be interesting none-the-less. Especially if we added to that the percentage of researchers within a nation that would have access to read that journal.