factor: Number that reflects the average number of times articles from a particular journal have been cited over a particular period of time (e.g., 2 years).
To understand better the differences in journal quality you might encounter, it might be helpful to contrast the scope and depth of the articles in such journals as The Journal of College and University Student Housing with those in such periodicals as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) or the Journal of Applied Psychology. Arguably these journals differ with regard to the sophistication and complexity of work each publishes. JPSP and the Journal of Applied Psychology are among the premier journals in psychology in terms of the quality of the articles, with high rejection rates, which some interpret as an indicator of quality. An article on the operation of journals published by the American Psychological Association in 2017 listed the rejection rate for the Journal of Applied Psychology at 88%, which was one of the highest for any of the APA journals listed; the Journal of Educational Psychology topped the list at 90% (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/2016-statistics.pdf).
The articles in JPSP and the Journal of Applied Psychology often contain a series of experiments, many participants, advanced kinds of analyses, and extramural funding. In contrast, The Journal of College and University Student Housing (published twice a year) typically contains research of more modest proportions, in terms of scope. The articles are often single studies of narrow scope with less advanced statistical analyses. A paper from the second issue of the 2015 publication of The Journal of College and University Student Housing illustrates these characterizations. “Is Three a Crowd? Exploring the Development and Satisfaction of Students in Triples” (Long & Kujawa, 2015) was conducted at one institution, focused on a fairly narrow topic, and used analysis of variance and chi-square as the primary statistical approaches. In contrast, a paper by Mann and Ferguson (2014), “Can We Undo Our First Impressions? The Role of Reinterpretation in Reversing Implicit Evaluations,” published in JPSP, presented seven experiments and was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship award. The research used mediational analyses, as well as a mixed design (both between- and within-subjects factors; see Chapter 10).
Journals differ in the criteria used to determine research that is likely to be (a) accepted for review and (b) published in a particular journal. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that journal impact is not synonymous with journal quality. Remembering Meltzoff’s (1998) comments about the importance of critical reading, mentioned in Chapter 1, every journal article needs to be approached with the attitude “show me.” We should not exhibit an overreliance on authorities, one of the logical problems in thinking (Shermer, 1997) discussed in Chapter 1, and assume that a high rejection rate = high quality.
Try This Now 2.3
Check out articles in a current journal in your discipline. Note differences in number of experiments, who the participants were, kinds of statistical analyses, sample size, and indication of grant support. In your discipline, what might be the equivalents of the Journal of College and University Student Housing and JPSP?
Open Access and Predatory Publishers
In your search for articles you may come across those published in what are called open-access journals. Open Access publishing refers to “unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse” according to the definition on the PLOS website (https://www.plos.org/open-access/). PLOS publishes several highly respected open-access journals primarily in the sciences, but there are open-access journals in every scholarly discipline; for example, Ergo is an open-access journal in philosophy. In the summer of 2019, there were more than 13,000 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org). In principle, the movement toward open access should provide numerous benefits, including faster publication of articles and availability of information. Many (but not all) open-access articles follow a rigorous peer-review procedure, which means there is a kind of gate-keeping to try to ensure the quality of the publication. These journals are free to the reader, but there may be costs associated with the publication of these journals, many passed on to authors.
Open-access journals: Journals that offer free access to the published articles.
Not all open-access journals are created equal. Jeffrey Beall, who at the time was a tenured librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, established a blog titled Scholarly Open Access; a cached version of this information, which provides a critical evaluation of open-access publishing, is currently available as “Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers” (https://beallslist.net). The site provides coverage from 2012–2017 and is updated in a separate section, which leaves Beall’s original list intact. Beall no longer maintains the list himself because of pressure he states he felt from his employer and fears for his job (Beall, 2017). The disclaimer section of the current website (now on an independent server) states that the site is currently maintained by a postdoctoral researcher in a European university (https://beallslist.net/contact/) who prefers to remain anonymous for reasons similar to those Beall mentioned.
On his original site, Beall maintained a list of what he called Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Open-Access Publishers, often referred to as Beall’s List. Criteria for identifying predatory open-access publishers were also provided on Beall’s website and included such characteristics as evidence “showing that the editor and/or review board members do not possess academic expertise to reasonably qualify them to be publication gatekeepers in the journal’s field.” The cached version of Beall’s website contains a link to Beall’s criteria (https://beallslist.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/9/5/30958339/criteria-2015.pdf). This cached site also recommends consulting a website called Think.Check.Submit, the aim of which is to “educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications” (https://thinkchecksubmit.org/).
Beall’s List: List evaluating open-access publications in terms of their standards; named after the originator of the list, Jeffrey Beall.
Frequently there are fees charged to authors to publish in these predatory journals (called the author-pays model); at one time, book publishers that charged authors to publish their books were called vanity publishers.
In 2011, Beall’s list of Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Open-Access Publishers included 18 such publishers; in 2016, that number had reached 923. Beall had also started two new lists: one that included journals whose metrics (regarding calculation of impact factors) are suspect, the other identifying what he called hijacked journals, where the name of a legitimate journal has been hijacked by a counterfeit one.
It is probably prudent to stick with Google Scholar or one of your institution’s databases, to decrease the probability that you will end up with an article from a journal on Beall’s List. A useful overview of the problems surrounding open access publishing and the pressure to publish is an essay titled “Anarchy and Commercialism” by Altbach and Rapple (2012, March 8) from Inside HigherEd (https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/03/08/essay-problems-state-journal-publishing).
Publication Practices of Journals
Most