by
Sascha K. Hooker
"The purpose of science is knowledge, and everyone has the right to know. What science has discovered is common property, and should be available to all" - D. C. Peattie
"if it wasn’t published, it was never done" - in E. H. Miller, 1993
Choosing where to submit work depends a lot on reasons for publishing, so it is worth considering some of the reasons why to publish at all, before assessing how to select the most appropriate journals in which to publish. The two quotes above illustrate the value and the necessity of publishing. Publishing in the "best" journal possible is the best thing for the science and the most likely to mean increased recognition from funding sources or potential employers. However, many things (masters theses, papers presented at conferences) just never get published, and this is perhaps because people do not gear their work for a particular journal.
Publish in accessible literature
The results of any piece of work should be made known to other researchers in order for science to progress. One piece of research often points out new areas of study that need to be addressed and this is may be followed up by other researchers leading to the input of new ideas. To keep your work to yourself is therefore doing science as a whole a disservice. Publication of work also provides feedback from other scientists, and for anyone wishing to do more research in future, demonstrating publishing ability is essential in obtaining future grants or academic positions.
Recently I have heard from a number of sources that marine mammal research (and especially cetacean research) is viewed as a "soft" science. One reason for this may be that a lot of cetacean research is unpublished, or is published in journals where specialists from various other disciplines (e.g. behaviour, ecology) do not see it. Another problem arising from the lack of publication of many marine mammal papers is that work that is published often cites "grey" literature (reports, conference abstracts) and many of these are difficult or impossible for others to get hold of, nonetheless to hear of in the first place. To researchers in other fields this means that published papers are "devalued" because many of their contents cannot be verified. This is another strong reason for publishing work in accessible literature.
Consider the subject matter
The field of marine mammalogy spans a wide variety of disciplines. It is important to try to publish according to subject matter, so that your work reaches the people to whom it will be of most interest. In many cases this will involve assessing whether your paper is relevant to the specific discipline you are studying or to others who study the same or similar species. By discipline I mean the topic - behaviour, ecology, genetics, pollution. For example, information such as unusual sightings or strandings are probably only of interest to other marine mammalogists or other mammalogists, whereas a paper of the behaviour of a particular species may be of considerable interest to other behaviourists as well as to other marine mammalogists.
In order to assess which journals to potentially submit a paper to, the first thing to consider is the focus of various journals, both in terms of subject matter and type of article (review, research paper or note). Information on the type of papers (by subject and category) that a journal publishes are generally found on the inside front cover of the first issue of the year or may be found in the journals webpages.
The benefits of publishing in discipline-specific journals are many fold. Paper are reviewed by specialists in the study of the questions your paper addresses (even if not familiar with the species you study), and your paper will probably benefit from their input. Publication in these journals will also introduce your work to other researchers who study similar questions using other study species.
Research which is published in journals read by taxon specialists can be easily lost in terms of broader value, and this has probably been detrimental to the perception of marine mammal science as a whole. For example, a paper on sexual dimorphism in acoustics of mammals (Poole, 1994) stated that this topic had only ever been studied in humans and elephants. This author had obviously seen none of the literature on sperm whales and other marine mammals that has been published. This stresses the need for making your results as accessible as possible.
Consideration of journal rankings
However, how high you aim in terms of publishing in the most "prestigious" journals, may depend somewhat on the type of career you want. The competition to stay in academia is high, and therefore for this career path it is well worth trying to place a few papers in highly-rated journals. To get jobs with NGOs or government, however, this pressure may not be so great, although there is no harm in aiming high. There is a trade-off, however, between prestige of a journal and the ease of publishing in it, so while the benefits to publishing in highly rated journals are high, the likelihood of rejection is also high. The most important thing is to publish.
Other differences between journals
Factors to consider in assessment of journals include their readerships and the ease of publication of articles. I sent out a questionnaire to various journals which have published marine mammal papers asking the questions: how many subscribers? representing how many countries?, how many library subscriptions? representing how many countries?, what is the average rejection rate?, what is the average time from submission to publication? Results of this show a lot of variation between journals. Knowledge of these basic parameters for different journals will help to assess how quickly journals will publish material and what the chances of an article being accepted by a journal are. Knowledge of subscription rates (and countries) are also useful in determining the impact of your article.
In addition, it is worth considering different journals’ criteria for rejection. Canadian Field-Naturalist, for example, has a very low rejection rate, since it will accept major revisions (even after months of revising) as an accepted manuscript. Its policy is to promote publication of data, since their editorial policy is to facilitate publication of natural history data that might otherwise be lost in popular literature or reports (F. Cook, pers. comm.). For students, page charges and reprint charges are another important consideration and may prohibit publication in some journals due to budgetary restrictions, though many journals have exemptions for students who are unable to pay.
So, how do we define the "top" journals to publish in? Peer review is the most important criterion. That your paper has passed the potential criticisms of your scientific peers says a lot for your work.
Abstracting indexes
Many journals are abstracted or listed by various source agencies. These include Animal Behaviour Abstracts, BIOSIS, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Current Awareness in Biological Sciences, Current Contents, Ecological Abstracts, Research Alert, Science Citation Index, Wildlife Review, Zoological Record, and many more. These indexes facilitate literature searches, and printed weekly tables of contents (such as Current Contents) may introduce researchers to titles of work published in journals that they would not otherwise see. Checking that the journal that you will publish in abstracts their contents in some of these indexes may therefore be very important to the later availability of your article. Articles published in yearly symposia or books are often not abstracted and are therefore harder for others to find using computer searches. A brief check into journals listed by Current Contents showed that surprisingly Reports of the International Whaling Commission and Aquatic Mammals, two journals which are responsible for a large proportion of marine mammal papers, are not listed by it.
Your funding agency may also be an important factor in consideration of where to publish. For example, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) in Canada, uses the Science Citation Index to weight publication records. This weighting is actually quite severe, and I have been told that for an academic career it is better to publish a few papers in "prestigious" journals than to publish a lot in less-well-thought of journals.
The Science Citation Index publishes a yearly list of journal citation reports. The main criterion it uses in assessing one journal against another is by its impact factor, the frequency with which the ‘average article’ in a journal has been cited in recent years. This weighs the number of citations by the number of articles a journal publishes and so preventing larger journals having biased impact. For example, in 1995, while Nature was the 3rd most cited journal (257,287 citations), it had the 10th highest impact factor (27.074).
A second important consideration in reviewing this citation index is the self-citation rate of a journal, or the frequency with which a journal cites its own articles compared to citations within other journals. A high self-citation rate may mean that the field is small or isolated. Interestingly, many of the journals with the highest self citation rates are those published by societies, subscribers of which receive the journal as part of their subscription.
Journals are also listed under subject categories in rank order by their impact factor. I have pulled out the major journals that publish marine mammal work from the ranking by CSI, and an abridged listing is shown here. For the full listing please check the Journal Citation Reports published by CSI.
Electronic journals
One final topic worth a quick mention is the potential future appearance of electronic journals published on the web. There was recently a review of this topic in Nature (389: 137-138. Plugging into electronic journals. Porteous, J. 1997) and the current assessment is that most readers prefer printed journals (and that most readers of web-journals would print out what they wanted to read). This may well change in future since electronic journals are widely and quickly reviewed, they have powerful search engines, and they have the potential for 3-d images, video animation, sound files and ‘dynamic’ mathematical modeling, and so at some time in the next few years may be worth considering.
Authorship issues
Another topic that this report cannot go into, is the problem associated with authorship of papers, especially multi-author papers. An interesting article was published this year in Nature on this, and sparked a swath of comments. Some of these are listed here..
Nature 387: 831. The games people play with author’s names. Anon. 1997 Authorship of a scientific paper is a privilege that it all too easily abused. Attempts to solve the problem with general rules encounter insurmountable obstacles, but individual accountability is unavoidable.
Nature 388: 320. The serious business of listing authors. Stubbs, C. 1997
Nature 388: 320. Salmonella or Smithella? Katscher, F. 1997
Nature 389: 777. All sorts of authorship. Garfield, E. 1997
References
Poole, J.H. 1994. Sex differences in the behaviour of African elephants. In: The difference between the sexes. Short, R.V. and Balaban, E. (Eds.) Cambridge University Press.
Last Updated January, 1998 by Sascha Hooker