Another long blogging hiatus. I can offer the same excuses as last time, plus a new one: I was told off after the last entry. Oh well! You live and learn, I guess.

This time, it’s this article in Science that captured my imagination. In it, James Evans analyzed a database of 34 million articles to show that, as more journal issues have gone online, the articles currently cited tend to be more recent, fewer, and come from fewer journals.

Evans argues that print journals forced scientists to do more browsing, perhaps stretching scientists to anchor findings more deeply into past advances. He also argues that, sure, searching online is a more efficient way of putting you in touch with the prevailing views in your field. The price we pay, though, is that such “narrowing of science and scholarship” (borrowing from Evans’ title) may accelerate consensus and impose limits on the range of ideas upon which we build scientific progress.

This is a fascinating contribution that, needless to say, I would find very difficult to formally evaluate. Yet, an intriguing question formed in my mind: is there a strict causal relationship between journals going online and this narrowing of scholarship, or are there other factors that explain that fewer, newer papers that come from fewer journals are being cited? In all fairness to Evans, he didn’t make any claims regarding a strict causal relationship, and he didn’t say that his observations fully accounted for the current citation pattern. Still, a provocative exercise is to think about other factors that may explain the trends he identified.

In terms of citing newer papers, I suspect that technical advances have a lot to do with that. For example, the advent of transgenic and knockout mice represented a turning point for biology. You can now obtain much more definitive answers about the function of a molecule if you have a knockout than before, when all you could hope for was having a more or less specific antagonist. It wouldn’t be surprising if advances of this sort have modified the citing behavior of a scientist writing a paper.

Regarding the citation of fewer papers, some studies have shown that many people tend not to read the references they cite, but simply copy them from other papers that have cited them—a behavior that one could refer to as “meta-referencing”. Also, I have anecdotal evidence of people who don’t cite anything that isn’t in PubMed. For example, when a referee asks an author to cite the classic papers from Dr. Smith from the 1950s, it’s not that uncommon to hear that they “couldn’t cite them because the abstract wasn’t in PubMed”.

So, the whole universe of citable papers does not extend beyond the 1970s, and many of us cite papers even though we haven’t read them, just because someone else did. And we haven’t even talked about the proliferation of review articles, in which you often find the authors citing other reviews on the same topic—a behavior one could refer to as “meta-reviewing”. No wonder few papers get the benefit of a citation.

The last point has to do with the observation that we now tend to cite papers from fewer journals. A first corollary of this fact is that the journals that publish the papers that garner those highly coveted citations will have the highest impact factors. A second corollary is that, if fewer journals have most of the citations, this would predict that we will see an ever increasing gap between the impact factors of the high-profile and the more specialized journals. In socioeconomic terms, we will see a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor at the expense of the middle class.

From where I sit, this prediction seems to be proving right. Back in the 1980s, when I started in research, publishing your work in any international journal truly represented the crystallization of a lot of work. So, even though you didn’t get your paper in Science or Nature, it didn’t matter so much because your small contribution, however humble, still counted for something to those working in the same field as you. These days, some journals in which I published my work are largely ignored by the community, which tends to think about them as “places in which you publish your work after everything else fails”. In fact, some people prefer to store the paper in the filing cabinet before publishing in some journals that have come to be too specialized for their taste.

As for the current middle class, the journals that aren’t regarded as high profile but are very solid publications that demand a lot from authors — those journals where you immediately send your paper after the “vanity” journals turned you down — are constantly trying to improve their image and position themselves in such a way that they are also perceived as high profile, quite often with great success. This is, of course, a very smart thing to be doing because, as the gap between rich and poor widens, you don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of the divide.

To end, I thought I’d paste Evans’ last paragraph, which also fed my imagination, triggering associations that I may share in a future post:

“The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph, like Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin of Species, to the modern research article. The Principia and Origin, each produced over the course of more than a decade, not only were engaged in current debates, but wove their propositions into conversation with astronomers, geometers, and naturalists from centuries past. As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.”

Photo of Newton @ Madame Tussauds by Colaco. Scan of Darwin portrait by cpurrin1.

Hi.

I haven’t been blogging for quite a while now. A combination of factors got on the way: I’ve been traveling, I’ve been covering at the journal for some of my colleagues who have been traveling, Coco and Roxanne have been doing a great job blogging about much more interesting stuff than I had, and, to be perfectly honest, I lost a lot of the motivation I need in order to sit down in front of the computer and type.

But the reaction elicited by last Friday’s report about the PLoS journals published in Nature was of sufficient importance to help me muster the energy to say one or two things about the many writings that have appeared in relation to that piece.

First, having previously commented on open-access publishing in this forum, I explicitly want to distance my journal and myself from any pejorative descriptors that might have been applied to the science published by the PLoS journals. I’m not an advocate of open access, but the quality of what open-access journals publish has never been an issue I have cared to discuss in public.

Second, I want to commend my colleague Maxine Clarke for being one of our few senior members of staff to face the backlash elicited by the Nature report, exposing herself to more vitriol in the process. Bravo, Maxine!

Third, to say that the Nature Publishing Group decided to publish Declan Butler’s report to intentionally damage the reputation of the PLoS journals shows a profound degree of ignorance about how editorial decisions are made in our journals. The business side of our trade never has any input on the editorial decisions to run whichever piece we care to publish, and the editors take a lot of pride in this fact.

To say that Nature ran the story because our firm is afraid of the open-access publishing model (another reaction to the news piece that I’ve encountered far too frequently) is also absurd. It’s like saying that we are afraid of Science, Cell or any other of our competitors. Our firm is not afraid of competition; we respect our competitors and observe what they do, the same way that our rivals are surely familiar with our strengths and weaknesses.

Furthermore, although I’m not free to discuss figures, our business model continues to be very successful, thankyouverymuch. Last, our firm has always been proactive in taking part in the open-access debate, and our directors have always engaged in productive discussions with some of the most influential advocates of open access (e.g. the NIH). So, to say that we are afraid of the open-access movement is also a very ignorant comment to make.

Fourth, I take strong exception to the comment I’ve seen in several blogs regarding the qualifications of journal editors to do their job, referring to them as failed postdocs who couldn’t cut it in academia. The job of editor is not fundamentally different from any other profession, scientists included — it pays the rent and puts bread on the table. To argue that someone who decided to pursue a career in academia is, almost by definition, more successful than an editor is not only absurd, but extremely arrogant.

In fact, I’d argue that many more practicing scientists than editors are frustrated with their careers; I know many mediocre scientists, but couldn’t think of a single mediocre research editor, not only at the Nature Publishing Group, but also among my many colleagues from journals that also employ professional editors. At a personal level, I’m convinced that to have the opportunity to work surrounded by so many intellectually sharp and well informed colleagues as there are at our journals is a privilege that many people who stay in academia don’t ever get to experience.

These comments should not be construed as an attempt to defend Butler’s article. As I implied above, I prefer to distance myself from some of his comments. Instead, I’m simply trying to defend the integrity of my profession and the integrity of those of us in the publishing world who care about the advancement of science and are proud of what we do.

“La ignorancia es atrevida” goes a saying in Spanish that, roughly translated, means “Ignorance is bold”. Judging from some of the comments I’ve read in response to the Nature article, it seems that the anonymity cloak provided by the blogosphere is very conducive to this purposeless kind of boldness. And speaking of Spanish sayings, this recent cartoon by (in my opinion) Spain’s best cartoonist — Forges — that appeared in the newspaper El Pais perfectly summarizes this point.

“The blogosphere is a blessing. Thanks to it, he doesn’t bray at home any more.”

“Congratulations!”

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this page, which shows the “h indices” of what the author of the page refers to the “best Spanish scientists”. The page is a bit difficult to navigate if you don’t know Spanish, but it doesn’t matter; I’m sure that if you have the time and inclination, you will find a similar page in your language and for the nationality of your choice.

The reason for bringing it up has to do with the raison d’etre of the h index — to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. The h index was originally introduced by J. E. Hirsch, from UCSD, in this paper and, briefly, his proposal was that a scientist has an index of h if h of his/her papers have at least h citations each, and the rest of his/her papers have no more than h citations each. In his paper, Hirsch argues why this measure is preferable to other criteria, and ends up suggesting that “this index may provide a useful yardstick to compare different individuals competing for the same resource when an important evaluation criterion is scientific achievement, in an unbiased way”.

I don’t know how many people have bought into this index, but needless to say, as any of these metrics, it has limitations. For example, if you’re the technician of a lab that has a bunch of highly cited papers and you’re always including in the middle of a long list of authors, does your massive h index turn you into one of those “best scientists”?

In any case, its limitations notwithstanding, I thought I would share it in order to stimulate our unsatiable appetite for ways to measure the quality of what we publish. Ready to go check if yours is larger than your neighbor’s?

Image by Brett L.

Time to return to the issue I brought up the other day regarding the open-access debate. Some people think that publishing firms rip people off by taking scientific information from the community and selling it back to the very providers of this information. This ignores, of course, that some journals such as the Nature titles, Science and the Cell Press stable add value to the content they publish by filtering scientific information in such a way that their imprimatur is (in most cases) guarantee of quality. Ironically, as these journals have professional editors, who are the public face of the titles, they tend to receive most of the negative feedback regarding our business model.

But, fine, let’s play along and ignore the fact that we at the Nature journals add value to what we publish. The purpose of this post is to illustrate that, even though we charge for our content, our publications are very cost-effective for our readers.

Take a look at this figure from an independent study by Credit Suisse/First Boston. It shows how much the University of California system (a very important user in terms of sheer volume) had to pay every time a member of their community used our journals online, and it compares this cost across different publishing companies.

As you can see, whereas the cost of using our journals is approximately one nickel per use, other publisher’s products cost well over an order of magnitude more (almost two orders of magnitude in one case).

I’m sorry that I had to blank out the name of the other publishers; I didn’t feel comfortable fully disclosing them. In any case, I’m sure you suspect who they might be.

So, next time you think that the Nature journals rip you off, think about this graph. Do the Nature journals really deserve all the flak they receive, or do we actually give people their money’s worth?