Editorial Essay: Why Do We Still Have Journals?
Editorial Essay: Why Do We Still Have Journals?
复制标题
DOI：
10.1177/0001839214534186
复制
发表时间：
2014-06-01
影响因子：
10.4
通讯作者：
Davis, Gerald F.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Davis, Gerald F.
网络大大降低了新期刊和其他传播科学成果的平台的准入门槛，期刊数量继续成倍增长。这给读者和作者留下了艰巨的认知挑战，即浏览文献和辨别相关且重要的贡献。与此同时，可能指导文献使用的期刊影响力指标变得更加明显和重要，导致“影响力策略”使这些指标越来越令人怀疑。我们的期刊所创造的激励机制已经被打破了。期刊的核心技术不是发行，而是审稿。审查过程的组织反映了关于贡献是什么以及如何评价贡献的假设。通过他们的评审过程，期刊可以证明贡献，召集学术社区，并策划值得阅读的作品。因此，不同的审查程序为不同类型的工作创造了激励。现在是时候进行更广泛的对话，讨论我们如何将社会科学事业的目标与我们的期刊系统联系起来。
The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to "impact gamesmanship" that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It's time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals.