Abstract
Both end users and authors commonly evaluate scientific journals based on several popular journal metrics. Such metrics, in particular the “impact factor,” carry crucial weight in terms of which journals authors choose for submitting scientific works as well as to what titles an institutional library subscribes. While previous research has focused on the value of journals in terms of “price per page,” no study has investigated the relationship between common journal metrics and the price a journal advertises for an annual subscription. In the present study, we took a linear modeling approach using Akaike information criterion to determine which journal metric (impact factor, Eigenfactor score, article influence score, total cites, or proportion reviews) was the “best” predictor of the advertised annual subscription price for scientific journals. Examining three differing scientific fields (aquatic science, sociology, and immunology) and accounting for for-profit versus not-for-profit status, we found results to be field-dependent. Total cites was the best predicting metric for the annual advertised subscription price for aquatic science and immunology, while the Eigenfactor score was the best predictor for sociology. We hypothesize the relationship with price changes with differing magnitudes of citation flows in a field. Clear from our study was that no single measure of journal quality is universally applicable to determine subscription “value.”
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Acknowledgments
We thank L. Fish, A. Clark, and W. Jacobs for comments on previous versions of this manuscript and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and valuable comments that improved the quality and scope of this work. We also thank A.E. Wilson on guidance relating to classification of journals.
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Shideler, G.S., Araújo, R.J. Measures of scholarly journal quality are not universally applicable to determining value of advertised annual subscription price. Scientometrics 107, 963–973 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1943-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1943-0