Smaller, more specific academic journals have more influence on conservation policy

Scientists don’t just want their results published; they want them published in the most influential journal they can find. This focus on a high impact factor is driven by their concerns about promotion and tenure, but it perhaps overlooks the important role that small publications can play in advancing their science.

A new article, entitled “Role of low-impact journals in the implementation of conservation” and published in the journal Conservation biology, disrupts certain assumptions about the importance of a journal’s readership and impact factor.

The new study, by lead author and doctoral student Jonathan J. Choi and other researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, compares higher and lower visibility scientific journals and describes their influence on conservation . Specifically, Choi and colleagues focused on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and demonstrated the critical value of smaller, specialized scientific publications.

They found that journals specific to a region or a particular type of organism often play an outsized role in establishing legal protections for an endangered species. Journals focused on ferns, clams, or coral reefs have proportionately more federally cited articles in species protection than larger, higher-impact journals.

“The Endangered Species Act represents one of the most powerful tools in America’s toolbox,” Choi said. “An endangered species can halt major construction projects and close industries, which can be a major political problem. So in the 1970s, Congress required an agency to use the “best available science ” before listing a species for protection. My question was where this science came from and how it compared to what we value in academia.

Scientific journals are often measured by “impact factor” (IF), which vaguely tells researchers how often an article is cited by other research in the first two years after its publication. Although it was initially intended as a tool for librarians to understand which journals were most widely read, it has since been used as an indicator of the influence of the underlying research.

For this study, Choi and colleagues reframed the definition of “impact” using a different metric: which journals were cited and how often to support listing a species for federal protection. The team combed through data on listing decisions from the second Obama administration (2012-16). During this period, 260 species were added to the list, more than in any other administration in recent history.

They found 13,000 references to support listing the species as endangered. Of these, more than 4,000 references concerned academic journals. By calculating the number of times each journal was cited in government lists in the same way that academic impact factor is calculated, the team was able to assess the importance of journals to federal conservation implementation. .

They were surprised to find that a disproportionate number of academic articles referenced in the ESA lists came from “low impact factor” or “no impact factor” journals. For example, research was more often cited in journals like American Fern Log And Ichthyology and herpetology than Nature Or Science.

Publications with a larger footprint may offer cutting-edge science that defines new theories, but it’s the small journal that provides granular details. The naturalist who walks through an old-growth forest collecting samples of ferns is most likely to observe subtle changes in species and habitats in the field and find an outlet in a specialist journal willing to publish a field-specific article. species.

Co-author Brian R. Silliman, the Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at the Nicholas School, highlighted the foundational work of small journals, which often face financial challenges compared to for-profit journals. Given the greater likelihood that these small journals will influence conservation agencies like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Silliman called on academic departments “to broaden their criteria for significant contributions to consider not just the impact factor , but also the number of times an article is cited by practitioners who apply their work.

“If young researchers feel a lot of pressure to work only for high impact journals, what kind of research is not being published?” » asks Choi. “What conservation questions are not being explored? The kind of research that is published in Nature And Science is still important, new, and cross-cutting, but what we are saying is that small journals have not always received the kind of credit for the conservation-oriented science that they produce. This contribution should be celebrated and recognized within the academy.

In addition to Choi and Silliman, co-authors included Patrick N. Halpin, professor of marine geospatial ecology at Duke, and Duke alumni Leo Gaskins, Joseph Morton, Julia Bingham, Ashley Blawas, Christine Hayes and Carmen Hoyt.