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Record W2134548949 · doi:10.1002/asi.23005

Are elite journals declining?

2013· article· en· W2134548949 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsUniversité de MontréalUniversité du Québec à Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsElitePublishingPrestigePublicationExcellenceCitationImpact factorDiversification (marketing strategy)Political scienceHierarchyLibrary sciencePublic relationsBusinessComputer scienceMarketingLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Previous research indicates that during the past 20 years, the highest‐quality work has been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this article, we examine whether this diversification has also affected the handful of elite journals that are traditionally considered to be the best. We examine citation patterns during the past 40 years of seven long‐standing traditionally elite journals and six journals that have been increasing in importance during the past 20 years. To be among the top 5% or 1% cited papers, papers now need about twice as many citations as they did 40 years ago. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, elite journals have been publishing a decreasing proportion of these top‐cited papers. This also applies to the two journals that are typically considered as the top venues and often used as bibliometric indicators of “excellence”: S cience and N ature . On the other hand, several new and established journals are publishing an increasing proportion of the most‐cited papers. These changes bring new challenges and opportunities for all parties. Journals can enact policies to increase or maintain their relative position in the journal hierarchy. Researchers now have the option to publish in more diverse venues knowing that their work can still reach the same audiences. Finally, evaluators and administrators need to know that although there will always be a certain prestige associated with publishing in “elite” journals, journal hierarchies are in constant flux.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.043
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.263
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Bibliometrics, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch, Bibliometrics
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.269
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0430.263
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0310.085
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0030.007
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.305
GPT teacher head0.528
Teacher spread0.223 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it