The Duck of Minerva

The Great Journal Impact Factor Race, Web 2.x, and the Evolution of the Academy

by Dan Nexon

6 August 2012, 2212 EDT

Back in May Robert Kelley touched off a discussion about Journal Citation Reports and impact factor rankings. Journal impact factor provides a textbook study in the consequences of a well-institutionalized but highly problematic quantitative measure. Impact factor is highly skewed, easily gamed, and somewhat arbitrary (two-year and five-year windows). Nonetheless, it drives a great deal of behavior on the part of authors, editors, and publishers.

Impact factor, of course, is just one objective in the pursuit of prestige. Editors, boards, and associations want the status that comes with being involved with a “leading journal.” Publishers want that prestige as well, but only for its intrinsic value. For publishers prestige, profile, status.. these matters because they separate the journals that a library “must have” from those that the library can do without. So journals such as International Studies Quarterly and European Journal of International Relations remain valuable and prestigious commodities even if they’ve had a few “bad years” in terms of impact factor; very few international-relations scholars, let alone librarians, are going to ditch them in favor of Marine Policy.

I’ve learned a great deal about impact factor and “prestige” over the course of two editorial bids; indeed, one of the things I’ve stressed is how far behind the curve most international-relations journals are at exploiting new media to boost citation counts and the general profile of the journal. Publishers think so too. Indeed, they’d like authors themselves to pick up some of the burden. Here’s an email from SAGE that a friend of mine sent along earlier today (each page is an image, so if you have trouble reading them click on each to enlarge):

This is pretty amazing stuff — on a number of levels.

SAGE covers virtually all the bases, from maintaining an Academia.edu account, to tweeting, to creating a website. They want their authors not only to self-promote on wikipedia, but also to take up blogging.
I’m not sure I’m cool with this. SAGE is asking academics to make significant time commitments. For most article authors, these commitments aren’t commensurate with the benefits they’ll receive. It isn’t as if taking of tweeting instantly makes you an important figure in your area of expertise. My sense is that the RSS feeds of most international-relations and political-science blogs have fewer than fifty subscribers, which suggests typical readership in the dozens. This means that the marginal benefits of the most intensive activities SAGE recommends aren’t likely to be worth the costs in time and effort. 
But journals don’t require these efforts to realize large payoffs. The most successful international-relations journals might achieve two-year impact factors of between three and four average citations per article. Once we get below the top few then we are talking about journals with between one and two average citations per article. The benefits for publishers such as SAGE then, is potentially quite significant. If all that effort generates fewer than ten additional citations for relevant articles, they still might see their journals (easily) catapulted up the rankings.
At the same time, I also feel a bit vindicated. This reinforces my sense — articulated best by Charli and Dan Drezer — that we’re going through a major transformation in the relationship between international studies and Web 2.x activities. Popular writers have long been doing — with the active encouragement of their publishers and agents — most of these things. Indeed, pretty much every author I’ve asked to interview for NBN’s SF and Fantasy channel maintains some combination of blog, website, twitter feed, Facebook presence, livejournal account, and so on. They have to: their income depends on their sales and their relationship with their readers.

The authors of the Duck aren’t exactly strangers to most of these methods of shameless self-promotion. Still, most of us got into new and social media for fun and community rather than for profit. I remember routinely having to justify my blogging activities to my friends, mentors, and colleagues. How times have changed.

At least those are a few of my disparate reactions. I wonder what our readers think.

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

7 Comments

  1. Colin Wight
    Colin Wight on 6 August 2012 at 23.02 EDT

    Journal publishing is going to go through fundamental changes in the next few years. I’m not sure if you’ve been following the debates about open access in the UK on the back of the Finch report. But publishing costs are being moved onto authors via Article Processing Charges ($2000 an article is the current estimate; although Unis are expected to pick up this cost). But the unintended consequences of this all are not yet clear, as internal competition for access to publishing funds develops, Unis are going to have to make choices of who to fund and who not. Also, disciplinary associations could come under threat; or at least those predominantly funded by by journal subscriptions. I’m all in favour of open access but there is a delicate ecology involved in the relationship between publishers and acdaemics.

    • Jarrod Hayes
      Jarrod Hayes on 7 August 2012 at 01.21 EDT

       I shudder thinking about the politics involved in getting universities to pay the processing charges.  For example, my institution makes no secret of the regard it holds for the humanities and the social sciences.  We’re already seen as a ‘drain’ on resources rather than resource generators (engineers).  The mind quails thinking about a world where I have to ask them to pay for my article to be published.

       And I wonder at the impact of journals less esteemed than EJIR.  Will universities pay for an article not in a top 20 journal?  not in a top 40?  I can imagine impact factor getting even more important than it is already…

      • Colin Wight
        Colin Wight on 7 August 2012 at 01.30 EDT

        You don’t happen to have any firm evidence about how your uni views the humanities and social sciences do you? I could really do with some more examples for my inaugural. Mind you data about ESRC funding is clear enough, and the recent attck on pol science in the states also makes the case.

        • Jarrod Hayes
          Jarrod Hayes on 9 August 2012 at 05.26 EDT

           By evidence do you mean numbers of something?  Probably not, unless class sizes and hiring patterns count, and I’m not sure I can get those.  Most of the evidence is structural…forcing humanities/social sciences to fit into the engineering/natural science modes of operation.

  2. Jarrod Hayes
    Jarrod Hayes on 7 August 2012 at 01.14 EDT

    I also wonder how effective the new push into social media will be in the longish run.  At first, sure, it will bring in more cites.  But as every academic starts doing these things (maybe not blogging, but Tweeting, Facebook, etc…) then the advantage disappears in the flood.  

    • Colin Wight
      Colin Wight on 7 August 2012 at 01.21 EDT

      Yes, agree. But an additional problem is the status of blogs etc. Whatever the problems of peer review, it at least provides some external validation of the claims made. Blogs don’t have that protection, yet a Professor of X, blogging on X, isn’t just a blogger, she/he is a socially positioned actor, and that social position confers epistemic credibility to the blog, that does not accrue to bloggers not positioned in the same way. If blogs begin to occupy the place they seem destined to do, then where’s the academic quality control?

  3. Flesherfomi
    Flesherfomi on 8 August 2012 at 23.12 EDT

    Hi another problem which skews this is that many journals are not even indexed regardless of citations or readership, there are a number of journals in my field that are standard reading, but are not in the JCR, so people whose academic career depends on jcr articles won´t publish there, but everyone reads the journal. Even some flagship journals of prestigious academies are not indexed in JCR. On the other hand I never read the top ranked journal in my subfield because my unis don´t subscribe to it, and I suspect fewer people read it than its ranking merits for the same reason.  I edit an online open access academic /practitioner journal (Interface) which has about 40,000 readers according to our cluster map but we are not indexed either and are not even sure quite how to go about it… we do have top people who publish with us though because alot of people read us…and I get the feeling this kind of impact, actually being read might eventually count as more journals shift to online (if not unfortunately truly open access).