Watching over innovation studies: Profiling the gatekeepers

Academic serials (especially peer-reviewed journals) play a very critical role in the scientific ecosystem and both integrity and independence are perceived as essential for good editorial governance (Rynes, 2006). For being responsible for articles selection (Bedeian et al., 2009; Feldman, 2008), elite board membership ensures the scientific quality of publications and “occupy key roles as opinion formers, gatekeepers and arbiters of disciplinary values” (Burgess and Shaw, 2010, p.630). So far, board elites have not been subject to a scrutiny proportional to their decision power (Burgess & Shaw, 2010) and an overall lack of transparency has been reported about the general editorial process despite of being actual gatekeepers (Miner, 2003; see also Bedeian et al., 2009; Horan et al., 1993).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Do Rankings Reflect Research Quality?

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and countries, and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. We argue that such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of evaluation. For that reason, an alternative ranking is developed as a quality indicator, based on membership on academic editorial boards of professional journals. It turns out that especially the ranking of individual scholars is far from objective. The results differ markedly, depending on whether research quantity or research quality is considered. Even quantity rankings are not objective; two citation rankings, based on different samples, produce entirely different results. It follows that any career decisions based on rankings are dominatedby chance and do not reflect research quality. Instead of propagating a ranking based on board membership as the gold standard, we suggest that committees make use of this quality indicator to find members who, in turn, evaluate the research quality of individual scholars.rankings, universities, scholars, publications, citations

Gender and geographical disparity in editorial boards of journals in psychology and neuroscience

We reviewed publicly available information from the top 50 journals worldwide in psychology and neuroscience to infer the proportions of editors by gender and country of affiliation. In both fields, the proportions of male and female editors differed significantly, both across editorial roles and within various role categories. Moreover, for 76% of psychology journals and 88% of neuroscience journals more than 50% of editors were male, whereas only 20% and 10%, respectively, had a similar proportion of female editors. US-based academics outnumbered those from other countries as editors in both psychology and neuroscience beyond what would be expected from approximate rates of senior psychology and neuroscience scholars worldwide. Our findings suggest that editorial positions in academic journals—possibly one of the most powerful decision-making roles in academic psychology and neuroscience—are balanced in neither gender nor geographical representation

What do editorial boards indicate about the nature, structure and directions of scholarly research?

Mestrado em Economia e Gestão de Ciência, Tecnologia e InovaçãoO output científico no que diz respeito às publicações está relativamente restrito a determinadas regiões. Países cientificamente desenvolvidos representam uma maioria significativa no que toca ao número de publicações, aquando comparados com países em desenvolvimento. Neste caso, indicadores bibliométricos são ferramentas úteis para efetuar comparações e identificar assimetrias. Revistas académicas são o método mais comum de publicação de artigos científicos e a sua importância para a disseminação de conhecimento é inquestionável. Os artigos submetidos são sujeitos a escrutínio e seleção, sendo essa função praticada pelos conselhos editoriais. Esta dissertação tem como foco o estudo dos conselhos editoriais de revistas académicas na área da economia do desenvolvimento em três regiões: África, Ásia e América Latina. Com o intuito de comparar as revistas destas três regiões com mais reputadas, revistas líder na área da economia do desenvolvimento foram igualmente analisadas. Este estudo explora uma área pouco investigada, pois embora o interesse pelas estruturas dos conselhos editoriais tenha vindo a aumentar, não foram encontrados resultados sobre revistas focadas em estudos de regiões ou países. Agrupando os editores, várias variáveis foram estudadas: género, proveniência geográfica, afiliação institucional e relevância científica, no sentido de identificar características na intermediação científica. Regiões nativas ao foco das revistas são pouco representadas, especialmente África e América Latina. A representação feminina está em minoria, representando apenas pouco mais de um quarto da população editorial. Finalmente, foi calculada uma relação positiva entre o impacto das revistas e a performance dos editores.Research output regarding publications is relatively polarized in a few regions. The majority of the published articles are written in English, but developed countries comprise an astounding difference when compared to developing ones. In this case, bibliometric indicators are used to measure these statistics, and asymmetries have been found through the time. Journals are the most common method of publication, and their importance to the dissemination of knowledge is undeniable since submitted articles are subjected to scrutiny and selection by their own internal governance. This dissertation focuses on the editorial boards' structure of leading journals covering development studies in three regions: Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in order to compare outlets covering studies in these regions with more impactful journals, leading ones from the development economics' subject field were also analysed. This study explores a relatively unknown area since although the interest about the journals' internal governance has been increasing, there are no significant findings on patterns and characteristics in the intermediation of studies focused on regions or countries. Gathering the editorial boards, several variables were studied: gender, geography, affiliation and research relevance. Native regions are found to be less represented in the respective studies' journals than expected, principally Africa and Latin America. Women editors are a minority, representing little over a quarter of the editorial population. A positive relation between the editors' relevance and impact of the journal was also found. Providing a scientometric analysis, patterns are discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Editorial Board Memberships: A Report on the Status of the Leading Information Systems Journals

Research journals play a significant role in the generation, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge in an academic discipline. To a great extent, the editorial board members of these research journals manage and control the generation, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge. They also act as policymakers, gatekeepers, and trendsetters. In their latter roles, editorial board members can influence several factors in a discipline; namely, the research topics, the research methods, the research scope, and whose articles are published. The primary goal of this study is to investigate and report on the status of the editorial boards memberships in a set of 14 leading Information Systems (IS) journals. The study does this along the following three main diversity elements namely titles, gender, academic institution, and the geographical location of the editorial boards’ members. The set of 14 journals include the IS basket of 8 journal list. Of the 14 reviewed journals, 7 are domiciled in the US and 7 in Europe. Results reveal a lack of common editorial board classification criteria whereby members of the editorial boards were categorized into different groups and referred to using various titles such as senior editors, associate editors, editorial board members, editorial review board members, and board of editors. Also, the results show that, as of June 2020, the 14 IS journals’ editorial boards had 1214 instances (988 unique occurrences) of editorial board members who came from 44 unique countries. Of those 988 editorial board members, 253 (26%) were females while 736 (74%) were males. In addition, out of the 988 editorial board members, 48% were from US and Canada, 26% were from Europe, and 26% were from the rest of the world. The results also reveal the schools and faculty with the highest number of editorial board memberships. Having a significant number of editorial board members from US and Europe (74%) fits with what Kubota (2019) called epistemological racism; a practice in which the Western world has an upper hand in determining and controlling knowledge and academic practices. Given the roles of the editorial boards in the review process and setting the research agenda for a journal, a more diverse editorial board might publish a more diverse research output. Furthermore, a more diverse editorial board is likely to have a repertoire of internal reviewers who speed up and lower the review process costs, which are challenges inherent in a less diverse editorial board

Do rankings reflect research quality?

Publication and citation rankings have become major indicators of the scientific worth of universities and determine to a large extent the career of individual scholars. Such rankings do not effectively measure research quality, which should be the essence of any evaluation. These quantity rankings are not objective; two citation rankings, based on different samples, produce entirely different results. For that reason, an alternative ranking is developed as a quality indicator, based on membership on academic editorial boards of professional journals. It turns out that the ranking of individual scholars based on that measure is far from objective. Furthermore, the results differ markedly, depending on whether research quantity or quality is considered. Thus, career decisions based on rankings are dominated by chance and do not reflect research quality. We suggest that evaluations should rely on multiple criteria. Public management should return to approved methods such as engaging independent experts who in turn provide measurements of research quality for their research communities

Computational innovation studies: understanding innovation studies through novel scientometric approaches

A cientometria é uma importante área de investigação dedicada ao estudo quantitativo da ciência e está a expandir-se a um ritmo sem precedentes. Surgiu como um paradigma de avaliação e espera-se que ajude na resolução de problemas sociais complexos. Apesar da sua importância, pouco se sabe sobre os guardiões da ciência e os mecanismos de governação editorial mais amplos que ajudam a orientar os esforços científicos. Neste projeto, seguimos uma perspetiva pouco explorada (assumimos os conselhos editoriais e as revistas como veículo institucional), numa área específica de investigação científica (os Estudos de Inovação). Abordamos diferentes aspetos em três etapas: em primeiro lugar, produzimos um retrato abrangente do fenómeno editorial, sondando as características estruturais heterogéneas dos conselhos editoriais, que são dominados por editores masculinos, anglo-americanos que exibem uma concentração de 85% das posições editoriais em 20% dos países; em segundo lugar, comparamos os materiais publicitários das revistas (blurbs) com uma medida de semelhança do cosseno identificando seis revistas com mais de 80% de semelhança semântica com a "Research Policy" (a revista principal) e descobrimos que as revistas podem ser classificadas em quatro grupos; e em terceiro lugar, combinamos os resumos (abstracts) das revistas realmente publicados com a descrição publicitária, revelando que o conteúdo selecionado em cinco revistas teria tido maior interesse para outras. Por fim, desenvolvemos uma ferramenta interativa que permite comparar a semelhança dos conteúdos publicados pelas revistas. Estas estratégias de investigação apresentadas juntam-se ao portfólio de metodologias que os analistas de política científica podem usar para compreender sistematicamente as agendas de revistas, a fim de refletir sobre o que foi realizado e o que ainda está por fazer.Scientometrics is an important research field that is dedicated to the quantitative study of science and is expanding at an unprecedented rate. It emerged as an evaluation paradigm and is expected to assist in the resolution of complex societal problems. For years, the impact of research has been at the top of the agenda for policymakers, however little is known about the gatekeeping processes and the broader editorial governance mechanisms that helps steer scientific efforts. In this project, we will pursue an under-explored perspective (we take on editorial boards and the journals as an institutional vehicle) and apply to a specific field of academic research (Innovation Studies). We address different aspects in three steps: first, we provide a comprehensive portrait of the editorship phenomenon by probing the heterogeneous structural features of boards, which dominated by men and angloamerican editors displaying a concentration of 85% of editorial positions in 20% of the countries; second, we compare journals’ advertising materials (blurbs) with a cosine similarity measure identifying six journals with more than 80% semantic similarity with Research Policy (the leading journal) and find out that the journals can be classified into four groups; and third, we match journal blurbs with the abstracts of papers actually published disclosing that the contents from five journals would have greater interest to other outlets. Finally, an interactive tool was developed so that researchers are better empowered to compare the similarity of journals contents in the future. These research strategies presented add to the portfolio of methodologies that science policy analysts can use to systematically understand journal agendas in order to reflect on what has been accomplished and what remains to be done

Social Network Analysis of Editorial Board Interlocking Phenomena from the Perspective of Astronomy and Astrophysics Journals

Editorial board members (EBMs) of journals play a pivotal role in authentic international scientific journals. Editorial Board Interlocking (EBI) phenomenon reflects the effectiveness and importance of the scholarly journal's editorial boards in various scientific fields. The primary purpose of this paper is to conduct a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of EBI phenomena from the perspective of astronomy and astrophysics journals. The present study is applied research based on EBI, SNA, and the descriptive-analytical approach. The statistical population of this study consists of the editorial board members of all journals of astronomy and astrophysics indexed in the JCR and official journal websites. There are 1597 job positions in 67 astronomy and astrophysics journals occupied by the 1394 scholars. Data analysis shows EBI for 95 scholars and 79 organizations. "Aleksei A. Starobinsky" from Russia and the Russian Academy of Sciences, "Daniel J. Scheeres" from the United States, and the University of Colorado Boulder have the highest EBI contributions in five journals. "Daniel J. Scheeres," with a centrality of 39, has the highest degree of centrality measurement among the EBMs. The presence of more than five times as many men as women indicates that astronomy and astrophysics journals are considered "masculine" by the editorial board. The EBI phenomenon is observed in astronomy and astrophysics journals due to the limited number of peop le eligible for the editorial board. Due to EBI, a limited number of famous scholars are made macro-policies such as publishing the articles, referees selections, and the reviewing process. Astronomy and astrophysics journals have "elite" academic networks. Gender inequality exists among EBMs, and the majority of them are male. Accordingly, these journals are "men's journals.