[xmca] Publish and/or Perish

Hi all,
Mike and I have had a conversation off line. He suggested I should
write to the list. It concerns the increasing pressure on all of us
to publish in "good" journals, and universities increasingly use as a
measure the presence and impact factor ranking in ISI Web of Science
as a measure. This is especially true for Asian countries and other
countries. With my graduate students, we always make selections based
on this criterion, because I want them to be successful in their home
countries and careers.

In the sciences, this has long been common practice; now the social
sciences are swept up by the same trend. I have recently been
bombarded by publishers whose journals have increased in their impact
factor. Furthermore, there are a number of companies that make the
rankings of their journal a key bit of information on the website.

(Some of) You may be asking what this has to do with you. Well, since
I have been editing journals (besides MCA, I also do CULTURAL STUDIES
OF SCIENCE EDUCATION and FQS: FORUM QUALITATIVE SOCIAL RESEARCH), I
have been asked by new faculty members about rejection rates,
rankings, etc. And I have been asked by department heads and deans as
well.

Some may decide to opt out, which would come with dire consequences
for many, who might find themselves in the position of not being
tenured or promoted.

Unfortunately, we (MCA) currently are not in ISI Web of Science,
which places those of you who publish in the journal in an
unfortunate situation.

One of the ways in which you, the community as a whole can be
proactive producing the conditions that would convince ISI to make
MCA one of the listed and ranked journals is to make it a habit to
cite RECENT articles you have been reading in MCA. Here is why:

The impact factor for 2007 (which is what was made available just a
few days ago), for example, is calculated using the following formula:

                           Number of citations in 2007 referencing
articles published in 2005 and 2006
impact factor =
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------
                                        Number of citable articles
published in 2005 and 2006

(They may not take into account self-citation, but I am not sure)

So the impact factor is 1 when a journal had 60 references from the
outside while having published 60 articles (over 2005 and 2006).

You see, as a community, you can help yourself by citing MCA work in
other journals. With high rankings, MCA will be included in ISI and
then you and your peers will be rated higher at your institution
because it is part of ISI.

Have a nice weekend all of you,
Sincerely,
Michael

Wolff-Michael Roth, Editor-in-Chief
MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY
Email: mroth@uvic.ca
Journal: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/1074-9039
Submissions: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mca

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Received on Fri Jul 4 13:44 PDT 2008