Factors influencing the choice of a publication venue in library and information science

Understanding scholar-trajectories across scientific periodicals

Despite the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications, our understanding of author publication trajectories remains limited. Here we propose an embedding-based framework for tracking author trajectories in a geometric space that leverages the information encoded in the publication sequences, namely the list of the consecutive publication venues for each scholar. Using the publication histories of approximately 30,000 social media researchers, we obtain a knowledge space that broadly captures essential information about periodicals as well as complex (inter-)disciplinary structures of science. Based on this space, we study academic success through the prism of movement across scientific periodicals. We use a measure from human mobility, the radius of gyration, to characterize individual scholars' trajectories. Results show that author mobility across periodicals negatively correlates with citations, suggesting that successful scholars tend to publish in a relatively proximal range of periodicals. Overall, our framework discovers intricate structures in large-scale sequential data and provides new ways to explore mobility and trajectory patterns.

Publishing in English or Chinese: a qualitative analysis of Chinese researchers' academic language choice

Non-native language scholars often struggle to choose between English and their native language in scholarly publishing. This study aims to identify the mechanism by which journal attributes influence language choice by investigating the perspectives of 18 Chinese scholars through semi-structured interviews. Drawing on grounded theory, this study develops a model for how journal attributes influence researchers' language preferences. We find that journal attributes influence researchers' perceived value which, in turn, affects their particular language choice, with contextual factors playing a moderating role. By examining the motivations underlying Chinese scholars' language choice, this study provides a critical understanding of the factors shaping their decision-making processes. These findings have significant implications for Chinese scholars, policymakers, and journal operators, shedding light on the issue of discrimination in academic publishing. Addressing these concerns is crucial for fostering a fair and inclusive academic environment.

Global Trends in Knowledge Production and the Evolving Peer Review Process

This essay thus seeks to provide further critique and clarity to the peer review process and the ways in which management of peer review is evolving. These changes occur within a context of massive growth in the knowledge production process: global trends, information technologies, and policies that encourage more people globally to take part in the research process. Associated with these global changes are stressors on the peer review process and particularly questions about who gets to be a peer reviewer and who has the right to produce knowledge under these processes.  Less a formal review and analysis of peer review across LIS, this essay takes the form of an autoethnographic narrative that that seeks to draw upon the researcher’s personal observations, experience, and reflections to critically examine changes to the peer review system that are taking place.

Publishing in library and information science journals: The success of less experienced researchers

This study explores the publishing success of less experienced researchers including early career researchers in a selection of library and information science journals. The study includes all authors of articles and reviews published in 10 library and information science journals during a 20-year period (2001–2020). The prior publication of each author is determined at the time of publication in one of the ten journals. The analysis includes 14,612 publications and publication histories of 36,417 authors. The results show that there are considerable differences between journals, and that the share of publications by less experienced researchers has generally decreased over time. Library automation journals publish considerably more publications by early career researchers than information science journals do. Publications in these 10 library and information science journals are being published by authors with an increasing publishing experience and fewer papers are being published by author teams with little experience.