Clarivate’s Web of Inconsistency

I am involved in the (painfully slow) process of trying to get the Open Journal of Astrophysics listed by Clarivate, which some researchers – or rather, their funding agencies – feel to be important. One of the reasons for this seems to be that some researchers are only allowed to publish in journals with an official Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Clarivate has set itself up as the gatekeeper for those, although they can easily be calculated using data in the public domain.

Leaving Clarivate aside for a moment, I was googling around this morning and found an independent listing of the Journal Impact Factor for the Open Journal of Astrophysics for 2021, namely 7.4, and found the following description.

Nice. Not bad, considering the Open Journal of Astrophysics is run on a shoestring.

Anyway, although I have grave reservations about the JIF, wanting to make the Open Journal available to as wide a range of authors as possible, I applied for listing by Clarivate in August 2022. I waited and waited. Then, a couple of weeks ago somebody asked me on social media about it and I tagged Clarivate in my reply. No doubt by sheer coincidence I received a reply from Clarivate last week, just a matter of days after mentioning them on social media. A similar thing has happened before. It seems that if you want to ask Clarivate something you have to ask them in public.

At least they replied eventually. We’re still not listed though. Not yet anyway. Among the feedback I received was this:

The volume of scholarly works published annually is expected to be within ranges appropriate to the subject area. However, we have noticed that the publication volume is not in line with similar journals covering this subject area.

When we first started up the Open Journal of Astrophysics I expected this would be an issue as we are new and have published many fewer papers than the big hitters in the field such as MNRAS and ApJ. However, after doing a bit of research among the astronomical journals actually listed on the Web of Science, I changed my mind and thought it wouldn’t be a problem. It seems I was wrong.

Take, for example, the Serbian Astronomical Journal which is listed by Clarivate. I’m mentioning this journal not because I have anything against it: it’s a free Open Access journal and that is very laudable. I just want to use it as an examplar to demonstrate an inconsistency in the above feedback.

According to its web page, the Serbian Astronomical Journal (SerAJ) has an official impact factor of 1.1. A search on NASA/ADS reveals that since 2019 it has published 46 papers which have garnered a total of 69 citations between them. This journal has been published under its current name since 1998.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics (OJAp) is not listed by Clarivate so does not have an official journal impact factor, but I have calculated one here and it is also mentioned above. Since 2019 the Open Journal of Astrophysics has published 69 papers (actually 70, but one has not yet appeared on NASA/ADS). These papers have so far received a total of 1365 citations.

So OJAp has published 50% more papers than SerAJ, with twenty times the citation impact, and a far higher JIF, yet OJAp is not listed by Clarivate but SerAJ is. Can anyone out there explain the reason to me, or shall I assume the obvious?

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics Open Journal of Astrophysics. This was published last week (on 15th February 2023) but there was a slight delay in getting the DOI activated and all the metadata registered so I waited until that was done before announcing the paper here.

The latest paper is the 8th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 73rd in all. This one is another one for the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics. The title is “The N5K Challenge: Non-Limber Integration for LSST Cosmology”. The paper is about ways of avoiding using the ubiquitous Limber Approximation which, I discovered this morning, is now 70 years old, Nelson Limber’s original paper on the subject having been published in January 1953.

The lead author of the paper is Danielle Leonard of Newcastle University and there are ten co-authors from around the world in countries including UK, USA, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France on behalf of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time to announce another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This was published yesterday (13th February 2023). The rate of submissions has increased greatly in recent weeks, so  I am thinking seriously about switching to a weekly round-up on here instead of individual posts, but for the meantime I’ll carry on.

The latest paper is the 7th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 72nd  in all. This one is another one for the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The title is “FRBSTATS: A web-based platform for visualization of fast radio burst properties”. This paper describes a software platform which can be accessed directly here. If you want to read more about Fast Radio Bursts, you can look here.

The authors of the paper are Apostolos Spanakis-Misirlis, who gives his affiliations as the University of Piraeus and University of Crete (Greece), and Cameron Van Eck of ANU in Canberra, Australia

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Well, it may be a Bank Holiday here in Ireland but there’s no break for the Open Journal of Astrophysics and it’s time to announce yet another paper hot off the press.

The latest paper is the 5th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 70th in all. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics. The title is “PSFs of coadded images”; for those of you not up with the lingo, “PSF” stands for point spread function.

The authors of this paper are Rachel Mandelbaum (1), Mike Jarvis (2), Robert H. Lupton (3), James Bosch (3), Arun Kannawadi (3), Michael D. Murphy (1) and Tianqing Zhang (1) and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. The affiliations of the individual authors are: (1) Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA; (2) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA; (3) Princeton University, Princeton NJ; all in the USA of course.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

The articles are coming in thick and fast at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. and why trying to get them refereed and published as quickly as we can. It’s time to announce yet another paper. This one was published officially yesterday (2nd February 2023) but I just found time to post about it here today before I go to my 9am tutorial.

The latest paper is the 4th paper in Volume 6 (2023) as well as the 69th in all. This one is in the Astrophysics of Galaxies folder.

The latest publication is entitled “Wide Binaries from GAIA EDR3: preference for GR over MOND?”.  The authors of this paper,  Charalambos Pittordis and Will Sutherland, are both based at Queen Mary, University of London. We published a related paper last month.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

I’m delighted to be able to announce the 10000th paper this year, and 1000000th publication overall, at the Open Journal of Astrophysics!

That is counting in binary, of course. In base ten the  new paper at the 16th paper in Volume 5 (2022) as well as the 64th in all.

The latest publication is entitled “Evolution of Cosmic Voids in the Schrödinger-Poisson Formalism” and the authors are Aoibhinn Gallagher and Peter Coles (Who he? Ed) both of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. Obviously as author I played no role in the selection of referees or any other aspect of the editorial process.

Aoibhinn Gallagher – bonus marks for pronouncing both names correctly – is my first Maynooth PhD student and this is her first paper, of many I hope (and expect)! We’re already working on extensions of this approach to other aspects of large-scale structure. You can find some discussion of this general approach here.

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

Here is a nice animated version of Figure 5 of the paper showing, for a 1D slice, the radial expansion of a spherically symmetric void (i.e. underdense region) using periodic boundary conditions:

The x-axis is in (scaled) comoving coordinates, i.e. expanding with the cosmological background, so that the global expansion is removed.  You can see that the void expands in these coordinates, so is expanding more quickly than the background, initially pushing matter into a dense ring around the rim of the empty void. That part of the evolution is just the same as for “normal” matter but in this case the wave-mechanical behaviour of the matter prevents it from being confined to a strongly-localized structure as well as affecting the subsequent expansion rate.

Of course in the real Universe, voids are not isolated like this but instead tend to push into each other, but we felt it was worth studying the single void case to understand the dynamics!

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time once again for me to announce another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. The new paper, published yesterday, is the 12th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 60th in all. The latest publication is entitled “Minkowski Functionals in Joint Galaxy Clustering & Weak Lensing Analyses” and the authors are Nisha Grewal, Joe Zuntz and Tilman Tröster of the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh and Alexandra Amon of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. The paper is in the folder marked Cosmology and Non-Galactic Astrophysics.

Incidentally, Dr Alexandra Amon is the winner of this year’s Caroline Herschel Lectureship in Astronomy, so congratulations to her for that too!

The new paper is about the application of topological characteristics known as Minkowski Functionals to cosmological data. This approach has been used in the past to study the pattern cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations; see e.g. here for one of my forays into this way back in 2008. Now there are more high-quality datasets besides the CMB so there are more opportunities to use this elegant approach. Perhaps I should do a blog post about Minkowski Functionals? Somewhat to my surprise I can’t find anything on that topic in my back catalogue here In The Dark…

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the  abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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The (unofficial) 2021 Journal Impact Factor for the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Since a few people have been asking about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I thought I’d do a quick post in response.

When asked about this my usual reply is (a) to repeat the arguments why the impact factor is daft and (b) point out that the official JIF is calculated by Clarivate so it’s up to them to calculate it – us plebs don’t get a say.

On the latter point Clarivate takes its bibliometric data from the Web of Science (which it owns). I have applied on behalf of the Open Journal of Astrophysics to be listed in the Web of Science but it has not yet been listed.

Anyway, the fact that it’s out of my hands doesn’t stop people from asking so I thought I’d proceed with my own calculation not using Web of Science but instead using NASA/ADS (which probably underestimates citation numbers but which is freely available, so you can check the numbers using the interface here); the official NASA/ADS abbreviation for the Open Journal of Astrophysics is OJAp.

For those of you who can’t be bothered to look up the definition of an impact factor for a given year it is defined the sum of the citations for all papers published in the journal over the previous two-year period divided by the total number of papers published in that journal over the same period. It’s therefore the average citations per paper published in a two-year window. Since our first full year of publication was 2019, the first year for which we can calculate a JIF is 2021 (i.e. last year) which is defined using data from 2019 and 2020.

I stress again we don’t have an official Journal Impact Factor for the Open Journal of Astrophysics but one can calculate its value easily. In 2019 and 2020 we published 12 and 15 papers respectively, a 27. These papers were cited a total of 193 times in 2021. The journal impact factor for 2021 is therefore … roll on the drums… 193/27, which gives:

If you don’t believe me, you can check the numbers yourself. For comparison, the latest available Impact Factor (2020) for Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society is 5.29 and Astronomy & Astrophysics is 5.80. OJAp’s first full year of publication was 2019 (in which we published 12 papers) but we did publish one paper in 2018. Based on the 134 citations received to these 13 papers in 2020, our 2020 Journal Impact Factor was 10.31, much higher than MNRAS or A&A.

Furthermore, we published 32 papers in 2020 and 2021 which have so far received 125 citations in 2022. Our Journal Impact Factor for 2022 will therefore be at least 125/32= 3.91 and if those 32 papers are cited at the same for the rest of this year the 2022 JIF will be about 7.5.

Who knows, perhaps these numbers will shame Clarivate into giving us an official figure?

With so much bibliometric information available at the article level there is no reason whatsoever to pay any attention to such a crudely aggregated statistics at the journal level as the JIF. One should judge the contents, not the packaging. I am however fully aware that many people who hold the purse strings for research insist on publications in journals with a high JIF. If there was any fairness in the system they would be mandating astronomy publications in OJAp rather than MNRAS or A&A.

Anyway, it might annoy all the right people if I add a subtitle to the Open Journal of Astrophysics: “The World’s Leading Astrophysics Journal”…

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Time to announce another new publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics! This one, published on Sunday, is the 8th paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 56th in all.

The latest publication is entitled “Search for a distance-dependent Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation at low redshifts” and is written by by Aditi Krishak (IISER-Bhopal, India) and Shantanu Desai (IIT Hyderabad, India).

This paper is in the Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics folder.

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here.

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

It’s time yet again to announce a new publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics! This one is the 3rd paper in Volume 5 (2022) and the 51st in all. We actually published this on Friday, byt I’ve only just got around to announcing it here now.

The latest publication is entitled Differentiable Predictions for Large Scale Structure with SHAMNet and is written by Andrew Hearin, Nesar Ramachandra and Matthew R. Becker of the Argonne National Laboratory and Joseph DeRose of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (both institutions being in the USA).

Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This paper is in our popular Cosmology and Non-galactic Astrophysics section.

P. S. Here’s a bit of feedback from the author of this paper about the referees:

They reviewed the paper in conscientious detail, and every comment was thoughtful. We feel that our paper has materially improved in clarity as a result of their critique.”

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