The Rebirth of The Philippine Agriculturist as an International Journal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the start of my term as Editor-in-Chief of The Philippine Agriculturist in November 1998, there were two challenges that I had to meet. One was the perceived decline in prestige of the Journal as shown by dwindling subscriptions. This was articulated by Dr. Jose R. Velasco, a retired professor of the College of Agriculture and a former editor-in-chief of the Journal, who remarked, “It used to be one of the most prestigious agricultural journals. It is now relegated to the forgotten shelves of libraries.” The other challenge had reference to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Dean Cecilio Arboleda of the College of Agriculture kept mentioning “ISI” when he talked of scientific articles of the faculty members. When I learned that the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Reuters, was the world’s arbiter of world class journals and that of 8000 journals submitted to it, only 10% to 12% were accredited, then I knew that the problem of prestige was tied up with the accreditation of The Philippine Agriculturist journal by the ISI. So, I read all articles pertaining to ISI and impressed on the journal staff that meeting its requirements was to be our goal as a team. One of the requirements was timeliness. A quarterly journal, which was what The Philippine Agriculturist was, had to be released during the stipulated quarter. This was the greatest stumbling block for the Journal. It was one year late and two issues were lumped into one. This was the status for the preceding 10 years. Another requirement was internationality. The Journal should follow international conventions in editing and there should be international diversity among authors and editors. The Journal editors use an international manual for editors so the former was not a problem. Some of our graduate students come from other Asian countries and their theses comprise a lot of the articles of the Journal, so internationality of authors was also not a problem. International editors? That was a problem that was a bit difficult to solve. The Journal had only two editors, both from UPLB – a part-time chief editor and one full-time managing editor. That’s it. The criteria for internationality also state that a journal should represent the best in the region or geographic area. That was not a problem. The researches of most UPLB staff are excellent by all standards and could be considered among the best in countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Definitely, it is the best scientific journal in the country. It won the Outstanding Scientific Journal Award in 1997 given by the National Academy of Science and Technology despite its being late and having two issues lumped into one. The other requirement was the peer review process which was also not a problem. However, we still increased the number of reviewers to two per article to insure excellence of the articles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.042 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".