Scientists don’t just want their results to be published; they want them to be published in the most influential journal they can find. This focus on a high ‚impact factor‘ is driven by their concerns about promotion and tenure, but it may be overlooking the important role that smaller publications can play in the advancement of their science.
A new paper, “Role of low-impact-factor journals in conservation implementation,” appearing Oct. 17 in the journal Conservation Biology, upends some assumptions about the importance of a journal’s readership and impact factor.
The new study, by lead author and doctoral candidate, Jonathan J. Choi and other researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, compares scientific journals of higher and lower visibility and describes their influence on conservation. Specifically, Choi and his colleagues focused on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and demonstrated the crucial value of smaller, specialized science publications.
They found that often the journals specific to a region or a particular kind of organism play an outsized role in establishing legal protections for an endangered species. Journals focused on ferns, clams, or coral reefs had proportionally more of their articles cited by the federal government when protecting species than more prominent, higher-impact journals.
Scientific journals are often measured by “impact factor” (IF), which loosely tells researchers how often an article is cited by other research in the first two years of its publication. Though it was originally intended as a tool for librarians to understand which journals were the most widely read, it has since been used as a proxy for the influence of the underlying research.
For this study, Choi and colleagues reframed the definition of ‘impact’ by using a different metric: which journals were cited, and how often, in supporting the federal government’s listing of a species for federal protection. The team combed through the listing decisions data from the second Obama Administration (2012-16). During this period, 260 species were added to the list, more than during other Administrations in recent history.
They found 13,000 supporting references to list species as endangered. Of those, more than 4,000 references were to academic journals. By calculating the number of times each journal was cited in the government listings the same way academic impact factor is calculated, the team was able to assess the journals’ importance to federal conservation implementation.
They were surprised to find that a disproportionate number of academic articles referenced in ESA listings came from ‘low impact-factor’ or ‘no impact-factor’ journals. For example, research was more often cited from journals like the American Fern Journal and Ichthyology & Herpetology than from Nature or Science.
Publications with a larger footprint can offer cutting-edge science that sets new theory, but it’s the small journal that provides granular detail. The naturalist stepping through old-growth forest collecting fern samples is the most likely to observe subtle species and habitat changes on the ground and find an outlet in a specialized journal willing to publish a species-specific article.
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.14391
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