Countries publishing in <i>JAN</i>

Communicating research findings and choosing where to publish is an important aspect of the research process. It is not uncommon to hear researchers ask: ‘What is the journal's impact factor?’ Discussions also ensue regarding the appropriateness of the journal for the publication of papers such as: review articles; discussion papers; protocols; methodology articles; or empirical research findings. In addition, such discussions often give a good sense of journals to be avoided (Clark & Thompson 2016) and those considered to have prestige, quality and attract international attention. JAN claims to be ‘a world-leading international peer reviewed journal’ (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2648/homepage/ProductInformation.html; accessed 19 September 2016) and we decided to look more closely at the number and type of countries that publish in JAN. The findings should provide potential authors with an overview of the countries that publish in this journal. In JAN's introductory editorial (Smith 1976); one of the stated aims of JAN was to become an international medium for the publication of scholarly papers. Excluding editorials, and book reviews, at the end of its introductory year, JAN was able to boast the publication of six issues with 32 articles from the UK, five from USA, two from Israel, one from Canada and one from Denmark. Interestingly, only eight of these 41 articles; six UK, one USA and one from Israel had co-authors, all of which were of the same country as the lead author. Researchers often publish their work in domestic journals (Salager-Meyer 2014) so it was not surprising that there was a predominance of UK articles. To answer the question: ‘which countries presently publish in JAN?’ we carried out a review of JAN issues over the period July 2015–June 2016 inclusive. Editorials were excluded and ‘included studies’ consisted of 234 articles. Table 1 provides an overview of this descriptive review and shows that JAN is now publishing articles from countries in the five continents – Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and America. Columns 2 and 3 shows that articles published in JAN were predominantly from Australia (40, 17%), followed by UK (39, 17%) and USA (30, 13%). Table 1, column 2, shows a total of 199 (85%) articles with ‘Solo country authorships’ from 28 countries by authors in the same country. This column also shows ‘solo country authorship’ articles ranged from 1-37. Figure 1 shows ‘Solo country authorships’ and shows Australia (37 articles) as the predominant publisher of articles by authors of the same country. In addition, this figure shows that UK is the second most prevalent country for articles with ‘solo country authorships’ (34 articles) followed by USA (26 articles), Canada (14 articles) and Taiwan (11 articles). The remaining countries had a frequency of eight or less. Table 1, column 3, shows a total of 35(15%) articles with ‘lead country authorship’ from 18 countries published by a lead author with co-author(s) from a different country. Figure 2, shows ‘Lead country authorships’ and shows frequencies of five or fewer with UK ranking first, followed by USA in second place with Australia and Taiwan (both with three articles) ranked joint third place. Table 1, column 4, shows the number of countries that co-authored with a ‘lead country authorship’. The number of countries that co-authored with a lead country ranged from 1-10. Table 1, column 5 shows the countries and the number of times that these countries co-authored on published article(s) with a lead country. Both column 4 and column 5 shows the top three co-authorship countries: UK co-authored with ten countries 17 times followed by the USA co-authoring with nine countries 15 times and Australia five countries 10 times. Column 5 also shows the number of co-authorship frequencies for other countries. Figure 2 shows the number of ‘lead country authorships’ and the number of countries that co-authored with the ‘lead authorship country’. To summarize, presently, JAN is publishing authors from all five continents of the world. The top three countries that featured consistently on all count indices were: Australia, UK and USA. JAN ‘solo country’ publications are predominantly from Australia, followed by UK and USA. Lead country authorships are mainly from UK followed by USA, Australia and Taiwan. The countries that most frequency co-authored articles with other countries are shown to be UK in the lead followed by USA and Australia. In conclusion, in its introductory year JAN articles were predominantly UK based. This 2015–2016 review examining JAN issues over 2 years shows that JAN's published articles are predominantly Australia based. These findings should provide authors with an overview of all countries that publish in JAN and an insight into the increasing collaboration between countries publishing articles. This information is quite useful since papers that include co-authors from other countries have the potential to strengthen the quality of the paper (Floyd et al. 1994), increase probability of acceptance for journal publication (Urbancic 1992) and enhance frequency of citation.

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.