Bibliographic record
Abstract
The past 3 years of 'living with Covid' have been challenging for scientific publishing, but as I write my year-end review for 2022, there are signs for optimism.Proceedings B has recovered well from this difficult period, with monthly submissions creeping upwards in the second half of 2022, and the journal is attracting high-quality submissions and continuing to diversify its content.Staff are now working regularly at 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, and last May we had the first 'in-person' editorial board meeting in London for 2 years.The impression I got at the meeting was that both editors and staff were relieved and enthusiastic to be interacting face-to-face without the constraints imposed by the more structured videoconference format we used in 2020 and 2021.A convivial night at a London pub and our traditional meal for staff and editors at a London restaurant provided ample opportunities for 'chin-wagging' and reinforced to us all that the social dimension of our work is critical for building relationships, brainstorming and developing new initiatives, several of which have taken shape during the year.From 1 January to 31 October 2022, we received 2092 submissions, a decrease of 184 in comparison with the same period in 2021.Because 2021 saw a decrease of 339 articles over the same time period, the 2022 results signal that submission levels are picking up and indeed there was a 4% rise in submission over the second half of the year.Of the 2022 submissions, the proportion rejected (74%) was identical to the previous year.So far, 475 articles have been accepted for publication and of these 232 are open access (OA), a significant increase over 2020 which is encouraging.Our target for OA content this year is 48.2% of published articles.The continuing upward trend is in line with our expectation to make the transition to fully OA for Proceedings B by 2026.Currently OA content is downloaded about three times more often than subscription content in the journal.Our times (in median days) to first decision (24), final decision (70) and from submission receipt to publication (98) have all increased somewhat, with our times to first and final decision below our targets.It has been notable this year that many editors, authors and reviewers have requested more time for their assigned tasks resulting in slower times overall.These delays may be partly associated with Covid, but also because of work overload as research and teaching activities expand again after the pandemic.The journal's impact factor rose in 2022 to 5.530 from 5.349 the preceding year.Proceedings B is currently ranked 19th out of 94 journals in the Journal Citation Reports category for 'Biology'.We receive submissions from numerous geographical regions, with the largest numbers coming from the USA (483), China (272), UK (239), Germany (120), Australia (109), Canada (101), Japan (83), France (75), Spain (51) and Sweden (42).These rankings are quite similar to last year, although China has now replaced the UK as the country with the second most submissions to the journal.We have continued efforts to attract submissions from under-represented regions and below I discuss our initiatives to increase diversity at Proceedings B which we hope will help to stimulate these submissions further.Review articles are published in most issues of Proceedings B and provide an outstanding forum for timely overviews of emerging areas and unresolved questions in biology.Reviews Editor Innes Cuthill has worked hard during the year to maintain a steady flow of submissions on diverse topics.
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.
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 | 0.024 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.040 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.187 | 0.140 |
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".