Yesterday, I was faced with a typically academic dilemma: which journal to submit to?I'd written a paper, one which, inexplicably, had been rejected by the first journal I tried to publish it in. Actually, like many people I purposefully aimed too high, going for a very good (i.e. high Impact) journal in the first instance, just in case I got lucky. I didn't, so, I started looking for something more realistic, i.e. a bad one.
But this got me thinking. Why does it matter where I send it? So long as it's published in a journal indexed in PubMed, which every even vaguely scientific publication is nowadays, people who'll find it interesting will see it.
Because people don't actually read journals, people search PubMed for papers relating to their field of research, or increasingly, allow an automated service to search it for them. No-one sits down and reads a journal from cover to cover, like a book. Publishing in a good journal looks better on your CV, and it does lend a paper some extra credibility thus perhaps making it more likely to be read, but not by very much. If it's on PubMed, it gets noticed.
Of course, just because I find all my papers through PubMed searches (or blog links, occasionally) doesn't mean everyone else does. But the other academics I know are the same: with the occasional exception of Nature and Science, we don't read journals. I'm sure this is partly a reflection of the fact that most of the academics I know are under 30, so we all grew up using computers and search engines.
However, maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that the same thing increasingly applies to older researchers as well. There are so many journals nowadays that searches are pretty much the only way to keep up to date with relevant papers; it would take too long to read, or even skim, them all.
I'm not sure that this is a good thing, though. It's a cliché that today's scientists are "too specialized" and don't know about anything beyond their own particular research focus. In my experience, it's not quite as bad as many people make out, but the efficiency of PubMed for finding the papers you want means that you're correspondingly less likely to come across papers offering new perspectives that you're not aware of.
Browsing an issue of a journal or even just reading the contents page gets you thinking about work that's not directly related to your own, which is how ideas and collaborations start. If you only read things because you know you're going to be interested in them in advance, you'll stay interested in the same thing for ever...
13 comments:
I keep about 6-8 journals on my RSS readers so I can scan the titles and read the especially interesting papers every week. I don't "read" the journals, but it does have the same effect. I imagine that is where publishing in a higher impact journal will help you.
There are four journals that I read every week and a few others that I scan through periodically, because it's often very productive to come across stuff you weren't looking for. I suddenly see connections with the core research I'm doing, stay aware of the context of what's happening in my field, keep stretching my own area of interest, and generally stay a better informed citizen. And yes, the journals I read are high impact.
When I'm doing a lit review, for a paper or a proposal, or course, it's Pub Med and if I come across relevant stuff in the Rwandan Journal of Subliminal Obscurity, so be it.
here is a reputable option for speedy publishing of a peer reviewed article:
http://www.plosone.org/home.action
A sample from the site:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007625
On a side note, I am observing disappearance of "letters to the editor" section from the pages of certain medical journals and wonder if there is a trend...
Cervantes: I completely agree. I worry that people don't do that, though: it's easy nowadays to spend your whole life on PubMed and never see a paper you didn't search for...
I still read journals. I might skip articles, but I generally go cover-cover on a handful (Nature, Science, Journal of Wildlife Management and Journal of Mammalogy). And I've got a whole slew that I skim the article titles on about once a week. So I do think placement matters, still, in this day and age.
I still read journals. I also might skip articles, but I generally go cover-cover on a handful (Nature, Science and NEJM). But I completely agree with you...
Since I'm not an actual academic, I sometimes have to be kind of ... creative about finding research papers I want to read online.
I'll search something like PubMed, then, if there's no link to the full text freely available, I'll Google-Scholar the author or article title and try to find the full text from some other source. Often someone will have uploaded a PDF of the article onto the Internet, and there's also always Google Documents --- if access to the PDF is restricted in all cases, you can click "View as HTML" and there'll be the text of the whole article, transcribed by Google.
But yes, accessibility issues aside, I do mostly search for individual articles rather than read journals cover-to-cover. Sometimes if a journal is archived online, I'll browse through the individual issues looking for articles that interest me, though.
Hmm, even though everyone I know uses Pubmed as a first source they still look at the name of the journal and authors. I think high impact and mid impact journals are still more respectable than the random journals no one has ever heard of. And, of course, something by our favorite authors (who have published awesome, relevant articles in our field in the past) carry more weight than people we've never heard of.
With all that said, I still get the Table of Contents for about 12 journals sent to me each month and I scan the titles of all the articles to see which I are relevant to me or are just interesting. Also, I have Pubmed set up to email me each week about new articles containing specific key words I will want to know about. This usually lends way more papers than I want to read but, again, I scan the titles just to make sure.
I can say for one thing, that publishing in high impact journals makes a difference when one is applying for funding. Noone wants to fund research that's only being published in "bad ones".
Altaira: That's certainly true. But I wonder whether it will continue to be true in the future - it seems like a relic of the days when a paper published in a minor journal was nearly as bad as no paper at all because no-one would ever be able to read it (I remember in my undergraduate days going on a three-hour quest to find an old paper in an obscure journal with no electronic version... and becoming even more fond of PubMed.)
I never search Pubmed for papers I haven't heard of before. I get about 50 emails per week with the Tables of Contents from various journal, and skim the titles to decide what to read. That way, I get pre-prints rather than having to wait a month for something to get to PubMed. But if you publish in a journal that isn't in my alerting list, I won't read your paper.
I'm a MH nursing student and while my uni has a great online library full of the latest journal articles and archives I often find it hard to find articles that are new and up-to-date.
Ideally I want a couple of journals that cover a wide range of mental health issues (without being too overly technical). It's a bug bear of research module at uni that they only ever seem to use general nursing articles for critique work in class (ratio of adult:MH students is 3:1).
Does anyone have any suggestions?
I've asked lecturers and placement mentors for journal recommendations and the only one I've had is mental health practice (which I already subscribe to). Does anyone here?
I only read your blog occasionally and only happened by today because a Scienceblogs "most popular" list on a sidebar directed me to a post you wrote on MRI imaging from last year.
RSS feeds are good, but just the sheer volume of interesting stuff out there could keep a person busy reading 24/7 till they die. So, really competition is quite keen nowadays.
Thanks for this blog btw. It is very interesting.
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