Page 61 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Publishing in Scientific Journals

what they consider to be a high-quality paper in a journal with a high
impact factor in the field.

Publication Delay
Publication delay in the strict sense is the time lag between acceptance
and final publication. Previously when journals were printed this could
easily take a year or even several years, in particular when the journal had
a large backlog. In those cases, space shortage was the main culprit.
Nowadays, printed journals may still have a large backlog, but they make
articles available in electronic form as soon as possible. For purely elec-
tronic journals the delay between acceptance and publication is often less
than a month. Authors hand in a manuscript that is largely ready for
printing. This is sent to the publisher who prepares galley proofs. These
are sent to the corresponding author(s) for verification. Once corrections
are made the article is ready for online publishing.
Luwel and van Wijk (2012) observed that over a period of 15 years
the time lapse between submission and publication for a selected group of
engineering, medicine and library and information sciences became con-
siderably shorter, sometimes even by 50%. As nowadays articles are first
made available online the real time lapse is even shorter. However, these
authors conclude that the competition between faster availability of recent
results (publication delay) and easier access to the older literature did not
lead to a reduced cited half-life for journals (we refer the reader to
Chapter 6: Journal Citation Analysis, for an explanation of this term).
Indeed, for many journals the cited half-life increased. Part of the expla-
nation is that reduced publication delay is of the order of months, while
availability of older literature is measured in years. Of course, another part
of the explanation is that researchers actually make use of this older
literature.

Citation Delay
The term citation delay can be defined in different ways, depending on
the point of view. In any case it is a difference in time.
For the author and in view of the modern scientific system, citation
delay can be defined as the time between submission of a final manuscript
to a journal, and corresponding deposition in a repository on the one
hand, and the first citation in a publication in any form on the other
hand. This can be an accepted publication as included in a preprint server