- Esteban Morales,
- Erin C. McKiernan,
- Meredith T. Niles,
- Lesley Schimanski,
- Juan Pablo Alperin
- Published: October 28, 2021
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257340
Abstract
Despite the calls for change, there is significant consensus that when it comes to evaluating publications, review, promotion, and tenure processes should aim to reward research that is of high “quality,” is published in “prestigious” journals, and has an “impact.” Nevertheless, such terms are highly subjective and present challenges to ascertain precisely what such research looks like. Accordingly, this article responds to the question: how do faculty from universities in the United States and Canada define the terms quality, prestige, and impact of academic journals? We address this question by surveying 338 faculty members from 55 different institutions in the U.S. and Canada. While relying on self-reported definitions that are not linked to their behavior, this study’s findings highlight that faculty often describe these distinct terms in overlapping ways. Additionally, results show that marked variance in definitions across faculty does not correspond to demographic characteristics. This study’s results highlight the subjectivity of common research terms and the importance of implementing evaluation regimes that do not rely on ill-defined concepts and may be context specific.
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Citation: Morales E, McKiernan EC, Niles MT, Schimanski L, Alperin JP (2021) How faculty define quality, prestige, and impact of academic journals. PLoS ONE 16(10): e0257340. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257340
Editor: Florian Naudet, University of Rennes 1, FRANCE
Received: March 28, 2021; Accepted: August 30, 2021; Published: October 28, 2021
Copyright: © 2021 Morales et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: Survey responses can be found at the following publication: Niles, Meredith T.; Schimanski, Lesley A.; McKiernan, Erin C.; Alperin, Juan Pablo, 2020, “Data for: Why we publish where we do”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MRLHNO, Harvard Dataverse, V1 Data regarding RPT documents can be found at the following data publication: Alperin, Juan Pablo; Muñoz Nieves, Carol; Schimanski, Lesley; McKiernan, Erin C.; Niles, Meredith T., 2018, “Terms and Concepts found in Tenure and Promotion Guidelines from the US and Canada”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VY4TJE, Harvard Dataverse, V3, UNF:6:PQC7QoilolhDrokzDPxxyQ== [fileUNF].
Funding: Funding for this project was provided to JPA, MTN, ECM, and LAS from the Open Society Foundations (OR2017-39637). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: MTN is a member of the board of directors of The Public Library of Science (PLOS). This role has in no way influenced the outcome or development of this work or the peer-review process, nor does it alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.”
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