.The Survey results are now available.
Did you take part in the Survey? Thank you for your help!
We asked a number of questions about the Journal, the Community Website, Impact Factor and research publishing in general. We shall use the data to improve JDR.
Did you take part in the Survey? Thank you for your help!
We asked a number of questions about the Journal, the Community Website, Impact Factor and research publishing in general. We shall use the data to improve JDR.
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In the table shown below (or you can download the pdf) we have arranged responses numerically, with the highest percentage of “yes” votes appearing first. It is very gratifying to see “I plan to publish in JDR in the future” at the top of the list! We would want some responses to be in the middle, so milk production focus at 56% versus milk utilization focus at 42% is reassuring.
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kMost reading (83%) is of individual articles found using literature searches, and only one third of respondents regularly read the Contents page (why were another third of you not sure if you did?!) Are the days of “browsing” over? In support of this, 63% of respondents said their workload restricts them from reading longer articles, so maybe Research Communications are the way of the future. Nevertheless, around one-third of you said they would only publish in full-paper format. If you were one of those, please use the Contact Form to tell us why! It is important that articles are visible, so we were pleased that most (71%) could easily find JDR articles in literature searches. Do our rivals have greater visibility? There was no clear consensus on this, but we can see evidence that overall visibility has increased (71% now more aware of JDR than 2 years ago). We do need to work harder at current awareness; only 41% always new when new content was published. We plan to move to monthly “Our JDR” Bulletins and also hope to increase the proportion of readers (currently 31%) who have Cambridge University Press Core accounts and receive alerts.
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How important is Impact Factor? Very! Third top answer (77%), more important than Open Access and much more important than social media awareness. The only factor that came close was Community Awareness; 62% of you felt this was just as important as Impact Factor. Do we understand Impact Factor? Most said they did, but half of you did not know whether 7% self-citation was a typical value. The 2018 Impact Factor will be calculated by Clarivate according to the simple algorithm shown top right. You will see that the citation “window” for IF is very short, and unless you are citing articles that appeared in either of the two years before your own article, they will not count.
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Clarivate now also publish a 5 yr IF value (bottom right), which was preferred by half of our respondents. In the long run we shall focus on 5 yr IF, but please be aware that the new, Community-based JDR management structure only started in 2016, so 2018 will be our first "true" IF value, and the 5 yr IF will not be properly reflective of what we are trying to achieve until 2021! And for those who did not recognize "self-citation", this is the proportion of the JDR article citations that were themselves made in another JDR article. Values up to 20% are regarded as acceptable, and we are a long way below that.
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There is a very clear and simple message: please cite recent JDR articles! |
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Another topic that will become more important in the near future is Open Access publishing. Your responses revealed a lower level of concern about this than we expected (39% thought it important for future funding) which may reflect geography (it is the EU that plan to make Open Access compulsory). This is something that we shall keep under review. When deciding where to submit, high IF was the dominant factor followed by quality Peer Review, relevance, cost and community. Online publishing and Open Access came next and at the bottom of the list were brand and hardcopy.
We also analysed the way that you searched for literature. The expected search engines were top of the list followed by Journal of Dairy Science, and only one-third of you used the Cambridge University Press search facility on Core. We would like that to increase! |
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Finally, we asked questions about the functionality of the website and Peer Review process. Although 61% found the latter to be easy to use, we would like to do better, and we would certainly wish to improve the website rating (50%). Again, use the Contact Form if you have specific suggestions please.
