Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been a successful year at Proceedings B with increased submissions and by year's end we surpassed our target and received 3006 submissions.The two main initiatives that we introduced this year-double anonymous peer review and the use of data editors-have both been successful and are now fully implemented in the review process.From 1 January to 31 October 2024, we received 2546 submissions, an increase of 178 papers compared with the same period in 2023 and around 5% higher than in 2023.Our rejection rate was 79%, somewhat higher than in the previous few years.Our times (in median days) to first decision improved to 17 compared with 19 in 2023, although days to final decision (77) and publication (115) increased because of the time required for data checks and implementation of double anonymous peer review.Also, the move to a new typesetter-Kriyadocs-also resulted in longer times to online publication during the implementation phase.So far, 304 papers were published open access, an increase of 25 papers compared with the same period in 2023 and open access content now represents 63% of all papers that we publish.In common with other journals publishing similar content, our impact factor dropped from 4.7 to 3.8.Proceedings B is currently ranked 18 out of 109 journals in the Journal Citation Reports category 'Biology'.Ecology, evolution and behaviour remain the most popular subject areas for submission and publication.Proceedings B is a truly international journal receiving submissions from diverse geographical regions, with the largest numbers (1 January-31 October) coming from the USA (614), China (389), UK (268), Australia (115), Germany (138), France (111), Canada (98), Japan (98), Spain (63) and Sweden (49).We continue our efforts to encourage submissions from under-represented regions and recruiting new Associate Editors from these areas can aid in this endeavour.In this year's round of new recruits, 17% of new Associate Editors who start their terms in 2025 are from countries in Asia, Africa and South America.In addition, as discussed below, this year we initiated a new Special Feature designed to highlight researchers from the Global South and indigenous communities, and we hope that this will lead to more submissions from under-represented regions and demographic groups.Proceedings B reviews provide an outstanding forum for timely treatment of emerging areas and unresolved questions in biology and are well cited.In 2024, we said goodbye to Innes Cuthill (University of Bristol), who for the past seven years has been the Reviews Editor for Proceedings B and prior to that a senior editor for the journal.I know I speak for all editors and staff in thanking Innes for his dedication and hard work in maintaining a steady stream of high-quality reviews in the journal.The journal received fewer Review proposals in 2024, with 64 compared to 74 in 2023.By the end of October, 16 Reviews were published as compared to 15 in 2023.Those interested in writing a review for Proceedings B should download the proposal form from our website https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/reviews and submit it to the journal for consideration.During the summer, we recruited a new Reviews Editor-Joel McGlothlin-from Virginia Tech University in the USA.Joel is an evolutionary biologist interested in how natural selection influences the evolution and maintenance of complex traits.His research integrates data from evolutionary genetics, behavioural ecology and physiological ecology and he has worked on a wide range of systems including birds, lizards, snakes and plants.Joel is originally from Tennessee and graduated from Vanderbilt University in
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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 | 0.047 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.050 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.247 | 0.210 |
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".