:smack::eek:
None of the physicists I’ve known made a big deal about their h index in public (except at the retirement party of one particularly-prolific fellow, where the hagiography mentioned, among other points, how high his was), but then, I’ve never been part of a tenure review board. I imagine that it does come up and is important there.
I know this is a spam-zombie, but this wasn’t clarified the first time around, and I’m curious - which ‘may’ is meant, here? ‘Might’, or ‘Allowed’? That is to say, does this sentence mean ‘some institutions include non-journal publications when calculating a citation index, some don’t’ or ‘the standard is not to include non-journal publications in the citation index’?
In my field (biochemistry) and high impact journals, the editor first decides whether the topic/interest of the paper fits that of the journal (based on titel/abstract), and either outright rejects the paper, recommends re-submission to a less discerning journal from the same family or sends it out to two or three reviewers. The reviewers can either recommend outright rejection of the paper, because it is not sufficiently significant for the journal or has fatal flaws, make acceptance conditional on specific amendments such as additional control experiments and discussions, or, very very rarely, recommend unconditional acceptance of the paper as is. The scientist then either does the additional work/experiments, present arguments why these experiments cannot be done,or decides to resubmit to a less discerning journal. Occasionally, if the reviewers disagree, the editor decides to do another round with different reviewers. The amended paper goes back to the initial reviewers who decide whether the paper is now acceptable.
I have frequently found that the reviewers comments helped to significantly improve my paper, or at least helped to formulate my conclusions more clearly, and I try to do my best to do the same for the papers I get to review. (Although, in one particular case I had to completely trash the putative reviewer paper in the supplemental materials of my paper, proving that the method he insisted I use did not improve the interpretation of my data and would have resulted in an interpretation nor warranted by the data)
One tactic that seems to be used frequently (at least in medicine) is for authors to cite their own work rather liberally, and not just in the methods section where it makes most sense to do so.
One of my supervisors was an expert in this and would routinely cite himself when, objectively, there were far more appropriate sources. By the end of the first paragraph of most of his articles, you could be sure he’d referred to six of his earlier papers (and of course, in each of them he had done the same).
Is there a citation index that doesn’t count such incestuous self-citation?
Then there is the ugly business of predatory journals
These are bogus journals that will publish articles without peer review, but collect a hefty fee from the authors. The authors can cite these publications in their job or tenure applications, hoping that the relevant decision makers don’t check too closely. Some of these journals will use names similar to legitimate journals.
From the academics on the board of the conference I’m involved with, high prestige conferences with good peer review (like ours) count, while workshops and regional conferences may not. Transactions and journals count more. Departments like to see things like reject rates, so conferences which accept 10% of submitted papers are better than those which accept 90%.
That’s computer engineering/computer science. My daughter is in a business school, there journal quality is very significant. My field has only a handful of journals where you can get published, all good, so it isn’t that much of an issue.
Yeah, the answers two years ago did not really address the question. Strictly speaking, what happens after peer review is that the editor/editorial committee/program committee makes a decision based on the reviews.
Your process works for journals - for conferences while the author is expected to modify the paper based on feedback from reviewers there is not enough time for another review cycle, so there is only accept/reject.
In the Transactions I review for you as a reviewer get to see all the reviewers’ responses and the response by the authors, which is helpful. Some papers have gone through three or four cycles of re-reviewing.
When I used to read medical journals, I routine discounted any publication where the authors primarily referenced themselves . Simplistic I know, but you’ve got to have some standards…
I never heard of the h-index until this thread. For mathematicians things are different. For one thing, multiple authors are (virtually) always in alphabetical order. (I know one exception but I was copy editor for the journal and this was a very special case.) Online journals are taking over. What happened was that as publication costs approached 0, journal prices soared. That sat badly with many mathematicians and they reacted founding their own journals. Fully refereed and nearly 0 cost. I am a founder and now copy editor of one. The reason costs cratered is that now all mathematicians typeset their own papers using the remarkable typesetting program TeX. This is much easier to use than the old cycle, get a typist to type it. Proofread and correct. Rinse and repeat. Send it to a journal, have them typeset it. Proofread and correct. Ugh. Now it is just type the TeX file and that’s the end.
Of course, all papers are refereed, more or less carefully. There is no duplication of results, but generally the referees will at least try to see if the proofs seem plausible. But mostly, they try to see if the results are interesting. They will often criticize the organization and the exposition. They you get to revise and resubmit. It can happen more than once, although I have never experienced more than two rounds of revision. Then it is published (or not).
My Erdös number is 2
I looked at the reviewer form provided by a humanities journal that has asked me to peer-review several articles. This is what they ask:
XYZ Journal
Article Title:
Summary of Article:
Recommendation:
Accept _____
Accept with revisions _____
Return with suggestions for revision but no commitment to publish ____
Reject ______
Specific suggestions for revision:
Do you archive your papers? IEEE pretty much does everything with PDFs, how you generate them is up to you. There are PDF checking programs to make sure the PDF is compliant with their standards, and the on-line archive takes pdfs also. I’ve been in charge of submitting papers from our conference to it for a bunch of years now.
Do they have something about level of reviewer confidence? In tech journals, you sometimes get papers a bit out of your area, and it is nice to give a review with low confidence when necessary. That helps the editor evaluate the reviews.
This paper describes an interesting study on ABC, showing that DEF can take place under suitable conditions. Unfortunately, the authors fail to adequately contextualise the work with reference to prior art in the field. In particular, seminal work from gkster et al is not cited, an unacceptable omission and a key structural weakness of the paper as it is currently constituted. I recommend publication subject to major revisions of the bibliography to address this oversight.
Use of TeX, or some variant thereof, is also widespread in physics. Specifically, there’s an extension/set of macros called RevTeX for getting everything in the format used by Physical Review, the most prestigious journal(s) in physics (and then, because it’s the most prestigious, most other journals accept RevTeX, too).
(and given that Hari Seldon was born at least 12,000 years after Paul Erdös died, there must be some very long-lived co-author in between there)
It’s no been unheard of for someone to find a draft of a paper that a deceased researcher never got around to finishing. Someone, perhaps the finder, then figures out how to finish the paper, adds their name, and submits it for publication.
Maybe Hari just came across a long-lost partial result of someone and did this.
Note that Paul Erdos is still “publishing”. He was always stating a lot of problems with conjectures about methods and answers. When someone solves the problem they add Erodos’ name to the paper. Maybe someone finally figured out the solution to one of his problems after a few millennia.
So my current Erdos number is 3. Perhaps I can get it down to 1 if I were to solve one of his open problems.
Do they also do that with other mathematicians who posed interesting problems, but who aren’t so prestigious to co-author with?
Stuff often gets reviewed and evaluated after it’s published, as well. E.g., for all the mathematical stuff you have your Mathematical Reviews and your Zentralblatt für Mathematik; it’s not something that might happen only in the sciences.
As for putting dead persons’ names on your own article, how can you get their permission? Unless it’s something that you and your buddy started writing together before he or she died.
RevTeX-type stuff: sure, it may save you the trouble of typing someone’s paper back in, but you’d be remiss as editor not to run the text through at least one cycle of professional proofreading and editing. Why assume the author knows the detailed rules of professional typesetting or even English spelling and grammar?
All my published papers are freely available on my website as PDF files. Some I copied from the journal web sites (copyrights be damned, although it is complicated as to who actually owns them); a few I actually scanned; a couple I retyped (it’s really easy with TeX) and all since about 1995 I just posted my own PDFs. At least 90% were in “my” online journal (although they were all refereed in the usual way).
Erdős was born less than 24 years before me (I just discovered he was born 15 days after my mother) and the way I acquired the number was to have a colleague who, as a grad student in Budapest, wrote a joint paper with him. When I wrote a joint paper with the colleague, I acquired my Erdős number. And this was actually before Erdős died. But now if you were to write a joint paper with me you will get a number of 3.
A true story about him. When my daughter was about 4 months old, my wife decided to walk her in the stroller over to the colloquium tea. E. spotted her (he famously liked small children) and asked my wife whether that was a boss epsilon or a slave epsilon. The correct answer is boss, although my wife did not understand the code.
There is no proofreading because the final text is the only text, so it makes no sense. Our authors are constrained to use our “class” file which forces the format to be correct. As for grammar and spelling, the referee is expected to mention any obvious errors and spell checkers are everywhere. Anyway a journal that collects no money cannot afford professional copy editing. Too bad. I don’t see our papers are worse than the average math journals. Better in fact, in many ways. The reason is that journals printed on dead trees generally have severe space limitations and the editors always want you to compress, compress, compress. I had previously noticed that papers written in 1940s and earlier, many of which I read, were much more readable than papers in modern journals. Since online journals do not have space limitations (electrons are cheap), authors can adopt a more discursive style. I know I take full advantage of this.