S&P: Editors’ Blog

The journal Nature Chemical Biology has an editorial that is well worth reading and pondering for other fields as well:

• 2010. On citing well. Nature Chemical Biology 6:2. p.79. doi:10.1038/nchembio.310.

Unfortunately, the editorial is behind a paywall. Here are the main points in excerpts.

The appearance of new ideas and discoveries in the scientific literature is a reflection of ongoing scientific progress. Individual articles are nodes of scientific knowledge, but citations of published work link together the concepts, technologies and advances that define scientific disciplines. Though information technology and databases have helped us to better manage the expanding scientific literature, the quality of our citation maps still hinges on the quality of the bibliographic information contained in each published paper. Because article citations are increasingly used as metrics of researcher productivity, the citation record also affects individual scientists and their institutions. As a result, all participants in the scientific publication process need to ensure that the citation network of the scientific literature is as complete and accurate as possible.

Many factors may stand in the way of good citation practices. [...] Each research group has its own referencing habits, and some may feature their own work too prominently or rely on familiar references without a critical examination of whether a particular citation is the most appropriate in the given context. Some researchers may not cite ‘old’ papers either because these are incorrectly viewed as being out of date or because inertia inevitably may encourage authors to cite the articles that show up more frequently in searches or that have appeared recently.

Researchers understandably are motivated, in both professional and personal ways, to have their scientific contributions recognized through citation by their peers. The community also values the accurate assignment of credit and precedence for scientific discoveries. As a result, even an accidental omission of a necessary citation may create an uncomfortable situation for a paper’s authors. More problematic, however, are cases where authors deliberately omit relevant citations. Because perceived novelty can be an important factor in determining where a manuscript is published, some authors may be tempted to avoid citing earlier or concurrent work from their own laboratories to enhance the apparent advance of a submitted study. In other cases, some authors may consider ongoing scientific disagreements, personal conflicts or competition a sufficient justification for omitting citations of work by others. Clearly authors need to do everything they can to avoid accidental omission of key references, and should never exclude relevant citations for nonscientific reasons. In turn, all scientists, independent of their roles as authors, referees or editors, need to renew their commitment to guaranteeing that literature citations correctly assign credit for ideas and discoveries and are placed thoughtfully in manuscripts and published papers.

Though editors and referees can help, authors are ultimately responsible for the information contained in their published papers. We recommend that authors take several important steps to increase the quality of their citation lists. First, principal investigators need to teach young scientists the appropriate ways to select manuscript references and mentor them in the ethical dimensions of citation. Second, authors need to put as much care into selecting and accurately citing references as they devote to the rest of their manuscripts. As part of this process, authors should perform comprehensive literature searches as they write and revise manuscripts, so as to identify relevant work that may need to be cited. Before including references in their citation lists, all authors should have read and discussed the candidate references to ensure that they are the most relevant choices and are called out at the appropriate point in the paper.

The responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the citation network of a discipline resides with all participants: authors, referees, editors and database managers. Thoughtful attention during the writing and review processes remains the first and best approach for ensuring citation quality and the appropriate assignment of credit in published papers. Yet new publishing and database tools that lead us to an interactive multidimensional scientific literature will become essential. As publishers move toward integrating functionality such as real-time commenting on published papers and creating ‘living manuscripts’ that preserve the snapshot of a research area through the lens of a published paper, while permitting forward and backward linking, the scientific literature is poised to become a richer environment that will support future scientific progress.

At S&P, we are fully committed to these goals, but could surely work harder to improve the citation practices. One of our criteria for evaluating submissions is “contextualization of research”, as spelled out in our inaugural editorial:

Are the main research questions contextualized in terms of earlier related work? Does the paper adequately cite related work? Could the impact of the paper be improved through modifications that would show the relevance of the results to future work in the same or other fields?

Advice to authors: by contextualizing results appropriately, the author not only increases the worth of the paper to the audience, but also makes the job of the editors and reviewers easier. It will be much easier for us to be sure that a paper should be published if we can clearly see what previous work it betters. Authors would do well to flag, both in the abstract and early on in the paper, the relationship of the paper to earlier proposals, and to indicate in broad terms what the relative advantages of the new approach are. Of course, it is then incumbent on the author to make sure that all such claims are fully justified in the main text of the article.

Another aspect of this is that once the relevant citations have been chosen, the bibliographic detail given in the article needs to be as complete and clear as possible:

• full first names of authors and editors
• both volume and issue numbers for journal articles
• page numbers for everything that appeared on numbered pages
• DOIs for every work that has a DOI (important both for easy access by readers to the cited literature and for all kinds of automated processes, present and future)
• URLs for unpublished manuscripts and other obscure sources
• conference proceedings formatted as specified in the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics

S&P strives towards citing well, which requires continuous attention from authors, reviewers, and editors.

To add to yesterday’s announcement, we just published the third article of this year:

• Rick Nouwen: Two kinds of modified numerals, doi:10.3765/sp.3.3.

Keep on rolling.

Today marks the start of what we hope will be a banner year for our journal. We just published two articles:

• a main article by Sigrid Beck on “Quantifiers in than-clauses”
• a commentary by Uli Sauerland on “Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla”.

We have three more main articles in production, which should all appear quite soon:

• Donka Farkas & Henriëtte deSwart: “The semantics and pragmatics of plurals”
• Thony Gillies: “Iffiness”
• Rick Nouwen: “Two kinds of modified numerals”

We also have two or three more commentaries in various stages of submission/production, and are always soliciting commentaries on any of our main articles.

Finally, there are four papers under current review, we’re expecting revised versions of a number of manuscripts, and we’re awaiting several manuscripts that have been promised to us.

All in all, the journal is ramping up phenomenally and this will be the year that the quantity of our output will reach the levels of the other three main journals in our field.

Please help us make the journal more widely known and please submit your work to us. You’ll get excellent reviewing and editorial service and your work will look great thanks to our superior typography and it will be published free of charge and openly accessible to everyone.

Here’s a reproduction of a figure from a recent article in Mind and Language by Pietroski et.al.:

And here is a reproduction a figure from a recent article in Semantics and Pragmatics by Chemla:

No comment.

We now have three major articles published in S&P and one commentary. We have two articles forthcoming after very minor revisions. We have six articles where we are waiting for major revisions. We have four articles under current review.

We thought we would share our current statistics about time to decision. The chart below displays the data for first submissions, resubmissions, and for the few submissions that we rejected out of hand without sending them out for review. Our average (and median) time to a first decision is 53 days. The quality of our reviews tends to be very high, if we may say so. We think that we offer our authors first class service and we hope for many more submissions after the summer writing season.

We haven’t posted to the editors blog in quite a while. We’ll have a fuller report about the journal’s first year soon. But since today we published a new article, let us take this opportunity to note the first two articles published in S&P:

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1. 1:1–46. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.

Elbourne, Paul. 2009. Bishop sentences and donkey cataphora: A response to Barker and Shan. Semantics and Pragmatics 2. 1:1–7. doi:10.3765/sp.2.1.

Read and enjoy! And please submit your work to S&P. You’ll be amazed at the level of service we provide to our authors.

Harvard’s faculty last night voted to adopt the open access mandate that was promoted by S&P friend Stuart Shieber:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

There was a NY Times article on this, and here, here, and here is some of Peter Suber’s coverage.

Congratulations Harvard (and Stu)!

[via Peter Suber]

Biolinguistics is an open access (?) journal, edited by Cedric Boeckx (Harvard University) and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (University of Cyprus). The inaugural issue includes articles by Noam Chomsky and others.

(Peter Suber correctly reports that the journal’s about pages state that there is delayed open access, but I wonder whether that is a simple error, since it is also stated that all content is free after a simple free registration. Note also that the journal requires authors to sign over their copyright. In any case, more free peer-reviewed content in linguistics is a good thing, even if there are some extra hoops involved.)

In a letter to Science, William F. Perrin, a past editor of Marine Mammal Science and a present associate editor of the Journal of Mammalogy writes:

I have had great difficulty in lining up reviewers. Sometimes it takes 8 or 10 tries to find someone who will agree to review a paper. The typical excuse is “I’m too busy.”

First I try the people who have published the most relevant and recent papers on the topic in question. Then I move down the range of choices. The temptation, and sometimes the need, is to turn to potential reviewers in less-related fields or those who are not so “busy” (i.e., are not producing much themselves). This inevitably leads to less-knowledgeable reviewers and often reviews of lesser quality, which of course complicates the editor’s job and sometimes enrages the authors.

If an average acceptance rate of 50% is assumed, and if each paper needs at least two reviews, then each paper published represents at least four reviews. Following this logic, if you publish three or four papers a year, you should be doing at least 12 to 16 reviews. Anything less means that you are sloughing off the work to others who are perhaps less knowledgeable and capable than you in your specialty, and you should not be upset when someone reviewing a paper of yours “doesn’t have a clue.”

Doing a fair share of peer reviews should be a recognized and expected part of the job for scientific professionals; it should be written into the job descriptions of salaried scientists and be considered in evaluating junior faculty for tenure. The caution should be “Publish and review, or perish.”

The average of published papers in semantics and pragmatics may be closer to 2 or 3 a year. So, this calculation would mean 8 to 12 reviews per year. Are you doing that many?

We here at S&P have promised our editorial board members not to expect more than 2 reviews each year (although we maybe should be getting nervous about the load of manuscripts that we’re receiving). Assuming that they review for other journals as well, that probably does add up to the “ideal” workload for reviewing.