Braun T. Diospatonyi I. "U.S. Scientists Dominate as Journal Gatekeepers : Should we do anything about the skewed decision-making power of a few?" The Scientist, Vol.19(5):10, March 14 2005
Eugene Garfield
garfield at CODEX.CIS.UPENN.EDU
Wed Apr 13 13:31:44 EDT 2005
Tibor Braun : braun at mail.iif.hu
TITLE : U.S. Scientists Dominate as Journal Gatekeepers : Should we do
anything about the skewed decision-making power of a few?
AUTHORS: Braun T. Diospatonyi I.
JOURNAL: The Scientist, Vol.19(5):10, March 14 2005
FULL TEXT FOLLOWS :
The Scientist : Volume 19 | Issue 5 | 10 | Mar. 14, 2005
US Scientists Dominate as Journal Gatekeepers
Should we do anything about the skewed decision-making power of a few? | By
Tibor Braun and Ildikó Dióspatonyi
_____________________________________________________________________
The editors in chief, deputy editors, managing editors, and editorial
advisory boards who control scientific publication – collectively known as
gatekeepers1 – exert a special influence on the orchestration of
international research activity. The selection of journal gatekeepers is a
self-organizing process that science has developed over the last three
centuries. An invitation to serve as a gatekeeper is both a distinction and
reward. But the process has skewed gatekeeper demographics, as we found when
we built and evaluated a database of international core journal gatekeepers
in 2003.2
We were trying to figure out whether counting such gatekeepers would be
correlated with the trends in counts of journal papers and citations. In our
database, science journals were defined as "international" if their
editorial boards included scientists from at least eight countries,
regardless of the journal title used. The "international" label in the title
of some journals may hide what is really only a national one. On the other
hand, for example, the editorial board of the American Heart Journal
includes not only US-based scientists but also others, mostly from ten
European countries.
The current database contains data for 240 core journals from 12 science
fields, chosen by the Glänzel and Schubert classification system,3 and
includes the top 20 ranked by ISI's journal impact factor in each of the
fields. The total number of analyzed gatekeepers can be considered as
statistically significant when they are compared to indicators based on
papers and/or citations.
Table 1 presents results for 2003 and includes the number and percentage of
gatekeepers for 10 countries. It also shows the number of papers in 12
science fields published and their citations, from 2000 to 2002, of papers
published in 2000. The top 10 countries account for about 86 % of the
gatekeepers.
In data not shown here, we found that with few exceptions the number of US
gatekeepers dominates the world of science to an extent that is considerably
higher than their share of publications and citations.
In Table 2 we present the number of editors-in-chiefs of the investigated
core journals in science and in 12 science fields. The prevailing dominance
of the United States in all fields is also clearly visible here.
The dominance of the US gatekeepers, as demonstrated by our measurements, is
not a conspiracy with some hidden intentions, but a consequence of the self
organizing nature of science. Nothing needs to be done. However, it is an
important reflection of the self-organizing mechanism which has allowed US
gatekeepers to have a decisive influence on what, when and where worldwide
research is published.
Tibor Braun (braun at mail.iif.hu) is professor of chemistry at the Institute
of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry, L. Eötvös University, Budapest,
Hungary and director of the Information and Science and Scientometrics
Research Unit (ISSRU), Institute for Research Policy, Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, Budapest. Ildikó Dióspatonyi is an ISSRU research scientist.
References
1. D Crane "The gatekeepers of science: Some factors affecting the selection
of articles for science journals," Am Sociol 1967, 2: 195-201.
2. T Braun "Keeping the gates of science journals. Gate keeping indicators
of national performance in the sciences," Handbook of Quantitative Science
and Technology Research (Edited by: Moed HFW, Glänzel W, Smoch V).
Kluwer-Springer: Berlin 2004, 95-114.
3. W Glänzel, A Schubert "A new classification scheme of science fields and
subfields designed for sciento-metric evaluation process," Scientometrics
2003, 56: 357. [Publisher Full Text]
Table 1. Science Gatekeepers, journal papers and citations for 50 nations.
Gatekeepers Papers Citations Country
Rank No. % Rank No. % Rank No. %
USA 1 6734 53.87 1 24526 32.07 1 1627684 35.32
UK 2 1265 10.12 3 6356 8.31 2 412217 8.94
Germany 3 797 6.38 2 6899 9.02 3 364841 7.92
Japan 5 427 3.42 5 4359 5.70 4 313590 6.80
Canada 6 405 3.24 7 2941 3.85 6 190696 4.14
Australia 7 284 2.27 12 1511 1.98 10 104726 2.27
Italy 8 267 2.14 6 3422 4.48 7 165009 3.58
Switzerland 9 256 2.05 10 1874 2.45 11 103734 2.25
Netherlands 10 235 1.88 9 2100 2.75 8 123716 2.68
Sources: Thomson-ISI Web of Science; Gatekeepers Database of the ISSRU
Table 2. Editors-in-Chief of 240 Core Science Journals
Country Sci Agri Biol Bios Biom Clin Clin Neur Chem Phys Geos Engn Math
I II
___________________________________________________________________________
USA 726 56 56 64 57 100 105 68 64 35 22 47 52
EU 343 38 32 32 25 25 25 25 19 42 33 26 21
UK 152 13 22 16 15 8 12 14 8 9 16 10 9
(2003 total)
Germany 68 10 2 7 3 2 5 6 5 13 6 6 3
Canada 35 7 2 0 1 6 4 3 5 2 1 3 1
France 30 4 3 0 0 3 2 3 0 4 6 4 1
Japan 28 4 2 2 3 2 1 4 5 2 1 1 1
Netherlands
28 2 2 1 3 3 3 1 3 4 3 1 2
Italy 25 2 3 5 2 0 1 0 1 6 1 1 3
Australia
21 8 1 0 2 1 3 0 1 0 2 1 2
Switzerland
18 1 1 2 3 0 2 1 2 4 1 1 0
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