C. Sean Burns

The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal.

A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an articles impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscripts title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscripts title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre- and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre- and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles.

Communication overload: a phenomenological inquiry into academic reference librarianship

Purpose – This study aims to provide insight on the meaning of communication overload as experienced by modern academic librarians. Communication is the essence of reference librarianship, and a practically endless array of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools (ICTs) are available to facilitate communication.Design/methodology/approach – This study relied on a phenomenological methodology, which included nine in‐depth interviews with academic librarians. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using RQDA, a qualitative analysis software package that facilitates coding, category building, and project management.Findings – Seven themes about librarianship emerged from this research: attending to communication abundance, librarians of two types, instruction not reference, twenty‐first century librarianship, user needs, trusted methods: filter not retrieve, and self‐impact. The shared meaning of communication overload among these librarians is that it is a problem when it detracts from or hin...

Gender differences in patterns of authorship do not affect peer review outcomes at an ecology journal

Summary There is a widespread perception in the academic community that peer review is subject to many biases and can be influenced by the identity and biographic features (such as gender) of manuscript authors. We examined how patterns of authorship differ between men and women, and whether author gender influences editorial and peer review outcomes and/or the peer review process for papers submitted to the journal Functional Ecology between 2010 and 2014. Women represented approximately a third of all authors on papers submitted to Functional Ecology. Relative to overall frequency of authorship, women were underrepresented as solo authors (26% were women). On multi-authored papers, women were also underrepresented as last/senior authors (25% were women) but overrepresented as first authors (43% were women). Women first authors were less likely than men first authors to serve as corresponding and submitting author of their papers; this difference was not influenced by the gender of the last author. Women were more likely to be authors on papers if the last author was female. Papers with female authors (i) were equally likely to be sent for peer review, (ii) obtained equivalent peer review scores and (iii) were equally likely to be accepted for publication, compared to papers with male authors. There was no evidence that male editors or male reviewers treated papers authored by women differently than did female editors and reviewers, and no evidence that more senior editors reached different decisions than younger editors after review, or cumulative through the entire process, for papers authored by men vs. women. Papers authored by women were more likely to be reviewed by women. This is primarily because women were more likely to be invited to review if the authors on a paper were female than if the authors were male. Patterns of authorship, and the role undertaken as author (e.g., submitting and serving as corresponding author), differ notably between men and women for papers submitted to Functional Ecology. However, consistent with a growing body of literature indicating that peer review underlying the scholarly publishing process is largely gender-neutral, outcomes of editorial and peer review at Functional Ecology were not influenced by author gender.

Norms of data sharing in biological sciences

Institutional environments, comprising regulative pressures by funding agencies and journal publishers, and institutional resources, including the availabilities of data repositories and standards for metadata, function as important determinants in scientists’ data-sharing norms, attitudes and behaviours. This research investigates how these functions influence biological scientists’ data-sharing norms and how the data-sharing norms influence their data-sharing behaviours mediated by attitudes towards data sharing. The research model was developed based on the integration of institutional theory and theory of planned behaviour. The proposed research model was validated based on a total of 608 responses from a national survey conducted in the USA. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) was employed to analyse the survey data. Results show how institutional pressures by funding agencies and journals and the availabilities of data repository and metadata standards all have significant influences on data-sharing norms, which have significant influences on data-sharing behaviours, as mediated by attitudes towards data sharing.

Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies

Abstract With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

Main data set, one paper per row

This is an anonymized version of the dataset used for most of the analyses in Fox et al. 2016. Manuscript ID numbers are random and the sort order within years is random. Editor ID is also randomized. Columns that could allow the dataset to be de-anonymized, such as editor seniority and editor years on the editorial board, have been deleted. The dataset includes one line per manuscript. This file allows recreation of most but not all analyses in the published manuscript. This is an anonymized version of the dataset used for the analyses in Fox et al. 2016. Manuscript ID numbers are random and the sort order within years is random.