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Scientific monographs have depressingly low sales. The main reason seems to
be slashed library funds, but most people are reluctant to buy books unless
they plan to read them. With journals, people (and libraries) pay for the
diversity and accept the fact that they might not read more than a few of
the articles (the rest don't cost that much, anyway). This is the reason
why monograph series are usually not commercially viable.
I have just had to counter charges from a committee of the main funding
body for Fossils and Strata that because sales are so low, the
international research impact of the series 'must be minimal'. (Maybe this
is the same tribe that was beating the jungle drums against the series a
while ago ...) As the Science Citation Index does not cover non-periodicals
such as Fossils and Strata, this probably seemed to them a safe statement
to make, but it certainly contradicted my perception of the series' impact.
So I performed an "impact study" of my own. The result was ... ahem ...
interesting.
I went to the last issue of the Journal Citation Index available here
(1993) and found the list of the top 15 palaeontological journals in terms
of Impact Factor (IF, essentially a measure of how often a contribution is
cited in the subsequent literature). Some of them, like the Journal of
Foraminiferal Research, are highly specialized, but six may be considered
generalized palaeontological journals. In order of descending IF they are:
Paleobiology, Lethaia, Palaeontology, Journal of Paleontology, Alcheringa
and Geobios. Happily, all of these are available in our library.
A couple of helpful colleagues and I then counted all the references to
these publications and to Fossils and Strata that occur in the last
complete volume (1995) of each series. The resulting numbers were divided
by the mean number of citation units (articles, etc.) of the respective
series, calculated as the average of the last ten years' volumes. We also
considered "journal self-citation", i.e. the number of citations that were
to articles within the same publicational series. (The reason we are
concerned with the latter figure is that the potential financeers might
consider such citations to be "preaching to the converted", i.e. less
important in terms of wider impact. We didn't consider "true"
self-citation, i.e. Bengtson referring to Bengtson, because that would have
been much more tedious to check for manually, so we just assumed that a
person's predilection to self-citation has nothing to do with the
publication outlet.) The table below gives
Cit. - total number of citations to a publicational series
Corr.cit. (given within parentheses) - total number of citations minus the
"journal self-citations"
Self.cit - percentage of "journal self-citations"
Art/yr (given within square brackets) - average number of citation units
published per year
RCIF - "relative core impact factor", calculated as Cit./(Art/yr) and
normalized to give the value 1 to Paleobiology, the leading journal in the
JCI list
CRCIF (given within parentheses) - "corrected relative core impact factor",
as for RCIF, but calculated on Corr.cit rather than Cit.
(If the columns below don't line up you may want to set your screen or
printer font to a non-proportional one [in which every character has the
same width], like Courier.)
Cit. (Corr.Cit.) Self.cit. [Art/yr] RCIF (CRCIF)
Paleobiology* 285 (92) 68% [31.9] 1.00 (1.00)
Lethaia 217 (155) 29% [43.2] 0.56 (1.24)
Palaeontology 297 (222) 25% [45.6] 0.73 (1.69)
J. of Paleontology 608 (285) 53% [120.0] 0.57 (0.82)
Alcheringa 62 (46) 26% [20.9] 0.33 (0.76)
Geobios 81 (37) 54% [52.3] 0.17 (0.25)
Fossils and Strata 46 (39) 15% [2.2] 2.34 (6.15)
[*We excluded the 20-year anniversary article by Gould ("A task for
Palebiology ...", Vol. 21:1), because it was specifically about
Paleobiology, and all the 110 references were to articles therein. Had we
included that one, the journal self-citation for Paleobiology would have
gone up to an almost embarrassing 77%.]
One may make a number of observations here, but just now I'm only concerned
with the bottom line, the one I'm bringing to the attention of Fossils and
Strata's would-be financeers (the authors seem to be aware of it already):
A contribution to Fossils and Strata is more than twice as likely to be
cited in the international paleontological core literature as one to
Paleobiology, the leading journal in the JCI lists, and, if journal
self-citations are excluded from the count, the probability rises to more
than six times that of Paleobiology.
The lesson from this excercise is not that this or that journal is better
or that monographs are best of all (we all know that there are many
different reasons why an article may be frequently cited, for example that
it's gloriously wrong or that it reviews all of mankind's knowledge on 12
easy pages), but simply that monographs are not in the scientific backwater
just because they are not covered by the Science Citation Index. The
results certainly puncture the assertion that Fossils and Strata has a
minimal research impact because of its low sales number. (But imagine what
it could be if more copies were sold ...!) I recommend other editors of
monograph series who have the same trouble with financeers that I have to
look into this matter as concerns their series. There may be pleasant
surprises in the stockings. Whether or not they can be converted into funds
for publication is, alas, quite another matter. The main lesson may still
be that if we want monograph series to survive yet a little while we must
be prepared to buy a couple of issues, even when we don't plan to read them
from cover to cover ...
Stefan Bengtson
Editor, Fossils and Strata
Co-editor, Lethaia
Stefan Bengtson
Department of Palaeozoology
Swedish Museum of Natural History
Box 50007
S-104 05 Stockholm
Sweden
tel. +46-8 666 42 20
+46-18 54 99 06 (home)
fax +46-8 666 41 84
e-mail Stefan.Bengtson@nrm.se
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