Why Do Journal Articles Linger in “Online First”?
Some philosophy journals have a lot of articles in “online first” status. They’ve been accepted, copyedited, and typeset, but not yet assigned an issue. Why?
That’s the question Brian Weatherson (Michigan) takes up in a recent post at his site.
It could be a “resource constraint” such as a printing budget, but for reasons he goes into, he is not convinced that’s the best explanation.
Another possibility has to do with something journal publishers make a big deal about: Impact Factor. What exactly is Impact Factor?
In any year, it’s the mean number of citations to articles published 1-2 years ago. It’s a really big deal—it’s the statistic that some companies, including Springer, highlight most prominently.
As Weatherson observes, this metric “makes no sense for philosophy.” As he shows with articles from around 25 years ago (which predates the “online first” phenomenon), some of the most influential philosophy articles barely got any citations during the first two years following their publication. His research indicates that for an article’s citations, “the biggest years are typically 3-5 years after publication.”
Citation ratios for articles published in 100 philosophy journals since 2001. The shaded area is the first two years of article age. Graph by Brian Weatherson. (See Weatherson’s post for an explanation of citation ratios.)
An article’s Impact Factor measurement begins not with its “online first” appearance but with official publication—that is, the publication of the issue in which it appears. So, by having articles linger in “online first” for a year or two, they can be read and cited for a while, and so be closer to their peak citation point when they’re finally published and their Impact Factor clocks start, thus giving the journal in which they appear a higher Impact Factor score.
Is this the actual explanation for what’s going on or just a “happy coincidence”? Further inquiry would be needed. You can check out the full post by Weatherson here.
The effect on the impact factor of philosophy journals is a happy accident, though I suppose it might be one motive among others not to ‘fix’ things, assuming a fix is possible or desirable. But here are just a few of the things going on here.
First, the problem isn’t new. The ability to publish online first means that papers that would might been hidden in a production/printing queue are now visible. The current situation is an improvement on how things used to be.
Printing is usually outsourced by publishers to printers (and printers to delivery companies, etc etc). Contracts will often specify a certain volume of printing per year that can’t be exceeded (at least without significant cost and/or contract re-negotiation).
Publishers will often have contracts with libraries to provide them with a certain number of issues per year. So as not to be in breach of contract, publisher will often want a bit of give in the system—a queue of papers in case there are any problems on the editorial side of things (fewer publishable submissions received, etc.). A good rule of thumb has been to have about a year’s worth in the queue.
Across the field, there are more papers than ever being published. If acceptance rates remain more or less constant, production/printing queues lengthen. If a journal begins with a sensible excess of a year’s worth of papers, it’s easy to see how that might expand to two/three years in a relatively short period of time.
No doubt there are many other things going on here, and they will depend of the particular publishers. Like the price of eggs, complex supply chain issues are involved that vary across companies, countries, tax regimes, and about as many messy, contingent processes as can be imagined.
The current system is certainly an improvement over a system with equally long queues, but no online access!
There’s a potential question of whether the possibility of online access makes journals lean more towards the side of longer queues.
But there’s also a question of what the harm is. As far as I can tell, the main harm is the historical difficulty of tracking what year some interesting academic work was actually done (and tracking the related questions of priority and influence). This includes the administrative difficulties of figuring out which papers do and don’t count towards one’s tenure or promotion file at institutions that have well-defined calendar year review periods. (I’m currently going through a step evaluation that is supposed to be based on work from 2023-2024, and am having difficulties figuring out whether or not to include a paper that has gone through several status changes with the publisher since 2020, but hasn’t appeared in hardcopy yet, and wasn’t included in my review in 2023.)
Totally agree that the ability to publish online causes hellish confusion. Dates that allow future readers to follow up citations (print date) come apart from those that indicate when then work was done and so matter for, e.g., an author’s career progression (online first). Both dates matter, and of course these dates would come apart whether the queue was one year long or three.
Both of these dates, and sometimes an even earlier acceptance date, should appear in the usual metadata/footnote associated with any paper, which at least should alleviate concerns regarding priority etc.
This is obviously open to gaming. Calculate when citations peak after initial release for that field (p). If it is greater than the duration (d) used for impact factor calculation, hold the article for “online first” for (p-d) period of time.