Trends in RePEc Downloads and Abstract Views

For the first time in a decade, I updated my spreadsheet on downloads and abstract views per person and per item on RePEc.

The downward trends I identified ten years ago have continued, though there was an uptick during the pandemic, which has now dissipated. There was more of an increase in abstract views than in downloads in the pandemic.

Since the end of 2011 both abstract views and downloads per paper have fallen by about 80%. Total papers rose by around 260%, while total downloads fell 38% and total abstract views 27%. 

I'd guess that a mixture of the explanatory factors I suggested last time has continued to be in play.

Nature Energy

I have joined the editorial advisory board for Nature Energy, a new journal from the Nature Group that will begin publishing at the beginning of 2016. The position involves giving feedback on submitted manuscripts, but I can also make suggestions for commentary and news and views articles. The latter are a special feature of Nature journals that provide less technical overviews of articles published both in Nature journals and other academic journals. I would appreciate any suggestions you might have for upcoming articles that the journal might cover in news and views, or topics/authors for commentaries.

Scopus Adds More Article Level Metrics

Scopus has added a new set of article level metrics. I think the most interesting one is "Field-Weighted Citation Impact" which tells you how cited your article is relative to other similar articles. I think this metric has a big potential in tenure and promotion cases. Here is Scopus' explanation:

Field-weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) 

Field-Weighted Citation Impact is sourced directly from SciVal.
As defined in Snowball Metrics, Recipe Book/Field-Weighted Citation Impact Field-Weighted Citation Impact is the ratio of the total citations actually received by the denominator’s output, and the total citations that would be expected based on the average of the subject field. A Field-Weighted Citation Impact of:

• *Exactly 1* means that the output performs just as expected for the global average.
• More *than 1* means that the output is more cited than expected according to the global average. For example, 1.48 means 48% more cited than expected.
• Less than 1 means that the output is cited less than expected according to the global average.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact takes into account the differences in research behaviour across disciplines. It is particularly useful for a denominator that combines a number of different fields, although it can be applied to any denominator.

• Researchers working in fields such as medicine and biochemistry typically produce more output with more co-authors and longer reference lists than researchers working in fields such as mathematics and education; this is a reflection of research culture, and not performance.
• In a denominator comprising multiple disciplines, the effects of outputs in medicine and biochemistry dominate the effects of those in mathematics and education.
• This means that using non-weighted metrics, an institution that is focused on medicine will appear to perform better than an institution that specialises in social sciences.
• The methodology of Field-Weighted Citation Impact accounts for these disciplinary differences.

Increasing Requirements for Publication

From "Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology":

Somewhat tongue – in - cheek, let’s imagine a contemporary editorial decision on the 1953 Watson and Crick papers (assuming that they were submitted together):

“Dear Jim and Francis: Your two papers have now been seen by three referees. Based upon these reviews, I regret to say that we cannot offer publication at this time. While your model is very appealing, referee 3 finds that it is somewhat speculative and premature for publication. Indeed, your model proposing a semi-conservative replication of DNA raises many obvious questions. As two of the referees point out, it should be possible to determine experimentally if the two strands can separate and serve as templates. This would address referee 3’s concern that strand separation is not feasible thermodynamically. I regret to say that without such experimental evidence, we will not be able to publish your work in Nature and suggest publication in a more specialized journal. Should you be able to furnish more direct experimental evidence, we would be willing to reconsider such a revised paper. Naturally we would need to consult our referees once again. Furthermore, since space in our journal is at a premium, if you do decide to resubmit, then we recommend that you combine your two submitted papers into a single and more cohesive Article, potentially including the X-ray studies of your colleagues at Cambridge. Thank you again for submitting your papers to Nature. I am sure that this revision will delay your Nobel Prize and the discovery of the genetic code by only one or two years."

Five Minute Paper

You may have heard about the Three Minute Thesis. Now we have the Five Minute Paper. Actually, it's called Elsevier Audioslides. Authors of articles in Elsevier journals are invited to create voiced over slide presentations about their papers to be hosted on Elsevier's website. The maximum length of recording is five minutes. As my presentation at LSE next week will cover my recent paper with Astrid Kander (as well as current work), I thought I could use some of the slides I made for an audioslides presentation on our paper. I didn't bother writing a script and just made it up as I went along. But that's the way it goes in a conference presentation too and, of course, in the Three Minute Thesis competition.

Here is the result.

I've also got an invite to do one for my paper in Biomass and Bioenergy. But as I've never presented that paper, I would have to make up the slides from scratch and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I think I'll ask my coauthor if he wants to do it :)

Environmental & Resource Economics Acceptance Rate 2013

Just got an e-mail from the journal noting that they got just over 600 submissions in 2013. They have already reached that level at this point of 2014. Back in 2004 they got less than 200 submissions. This is a common trend at many journals including Ecological Economics, where I am an associate editor. The email from ERE also notes that their impact factor is now 1.7 and this too has risen over time (0.6 in 2005). One of the reasons for that is the increased coverage of economics journals in the Journal Citation Reports. The number covered doubled in the last decade and that increases the opportunity to get cited in outlets covered by the JCR. One thing, ERE don't report on is their acceptance rate, but it is easy to calculate. According to the JCR they published 83 articles in 2013. Therefore, the acceptance rate is 13%.

I previously reported that the acceptance rate at ERE was 21%. So, this is a big drop. This is also a common trend.

Citation Data for Citation Prediction Paper Now Available

The data underlying my recent working paper: "High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information" are now available from the ANU Data Repository. The data set includes most journal articles in economics and political science published in 2006 and included in the Web of Science and the number of citations that received each year through 2012. There is also a worksheet with all economics articles from 1999 too. That's not mentioned in the working paper but is mentioned in the revised version of the article I just resubmitted to the journal. The journal's (PLoS ONE) data policy requires all data to be made available with DOI's if possible. This is definitely the current trend and looks like becoming the norm. For example, Energy Economics requires both data and code to be submitted prior to publication. I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously I am in favor of replicability but putting together datasets costs time and/or money and so it seems a bit unfair to force authors to make their data freely available as the price of publication.

P.S. 9th September
My paper was accepted at PLoS ONE! :)

"Economic Growth and the Transition from Traditional to Modern Energy in Sweden" to be Published in Energy Economics

We started working on this paper when I visited Sweden in September 2010. It took a while till we were both happy with the paper. Then we submitted it to what I think is the top economic history journal. We got a revise and resubmit. I worked hard to do exactly what the referees wanted but the editor rejected the paper. I think this was a first for me. Of course, I had declined to resubmit papers in the past because I thought the chances were better elsewhere. Then we submitted to another economic history journal who gave us a revise and resubmit too. But this time we decided to not resubmit as it seemed unlikely we could please the referees. So, then I submitted the paper to Energy Economics and got a "minor revisions" and now it is accepted. This is a fairly typical story I think in terms of time taken and submissions made.

New ANU Open Access Policy

ANU researchers are now required to submit all published research outputs to our institutional open access repository. Details of the policy are here. Material should be submitted here. Previously, this was on a voluntary basis. Holders of ARC grants would have needed to justify why outputs of their project were not available on an open access basis. As in economics we have a very strong working paper culture this seems unnecessary. But that isn't the case in other disciplines and I guess a one size fits all policy is easier to implement and enforce.

2013 JCR Released

The 2013 edition of Journal Citation Reports has been released. I don't like the new interface that was recently introduced and it wasn't obvious how to download data easily but then I discovered there was a button at top right to download everything you had results on at that point without selecting journals individually. So, now I figured that there will be more analysis coming. Anyway, here is the report for PLoS ONE, which is the journal visitors to my blog seem most interested in :)

Yes, the journal lost ground again on all impact metrics as has been expected. It still does fairly well for a journal that publishes so many papers. I have an article under review with submission number 40332 submitted on 16th July. So, using those numbers and last year's number of published articles we get an acceptance rate of 42%, which is likely to be an underestimate if the number of articles published is still rising.

Big in Japan

I don't think our book will be big in Japan even, but it's nice to see a flyer for it in Japanese :)

 

I am now back in Canberra finally and catching up with teaching prep and looking at the books that Elgar sent us as payment :P An interesting one is The Art and Practice of Economic Research, which Shuang selected for me from Elgar's catalogue. Twenty five leading economists were asked almost exactly the same questions about various aspects of their career and worklife. It's reassuring to read that many top researchers confess to bad time management and feeling overwhelmed, for example: "What I am doing is not even feasible let alone optimal".

In other news, we have quite a few new CCEP working papers on RePEc. I hope to do a bit more blogging in the near future if only based on material from revising my energy economics lectures.

Environment and Development Economics is 20 Years Old

And there is a special issue to celebrate. You can find the introductory article from the editors here. One of my tasks as a post-doc at University of York was helping my boss, Charles Perrings, with the administrative tasks for the new journal like sending invitation letters to the editorial board members. It's also 20 years since I got my PhD - my defence was in April 1994 - I started the post-doc at York as an "ABD" in September 1993. Time flies!

Right now I'm at the IAEE meeting in New York City, will be going on to the Atlantic Workshop in Spain next week and the World Congresss of Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul the following week. Not surprisingly, the main talk here is about shale oil and gas and their implications. Flying over Pennsylvania on Sunday I saw quite a few drilling sites...

Asia and the Pacific Policy Society

The Asia and the Pacific Policy Society is an academic society set up in association with Crawford School's flagship journal, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies. Joining the society is free.

Elsevier Article Usage Dashboards and Tips for Early Career Researchers

The new article usage dashboards are a nice feature of Elsevier journals. Here is the dashboard for my 2013 article in Energy Economics:

It's interesting to see where our paper is being downloaded. China is in the lead. Obviously there are a lot of downloads in Sweden and Australia as the authors are Swedish and Australian and the data is Swedish. Also, there are a lot of downloads in Turkey, which has a lot of researchers in energy economics.

There is also a link in the Dashboard to a page with lots of useful guides for early career researchers. Some of the advice will also be useful for more senior researchers looking to get greater impact from their publications.

Reforming IPCC Communications

The IPCC is currently discussing whether to change its approach to publications and communications in future years. We (Frank Jotzo and I) were asked about our opinions as former lead authors by the people in the relevant government departments here. It seems to make sense to have more of a continuous reporting model given the capability of the web. Perhaps each chapter could be updated one at a time on an ongoing cycle or even a Wikipedia style format could be adopted. On the other hand, the large septennial assessment reports do generate a big media splash for a few days when they are released, which the continuous communication format would not. If assessment reports are continued, then maybe they should all be released simultaneously, or each Working Group release its report 2 years apart. The 5th assessment report cycle saw WG1 release its report in September 2013 and then WG2 and WG3 released their reports two weeks apart in April 2013, which was somewhat confusing. We also thought that the IPCC plenary should be less prescriptive about the contents of each chapter including sub-sections and what should be in each subsection.

COIN in the UK have released a short report with some more radical suggestions. In particular, they think the IPCC should do human interest stories that are more suitable for most media outlets and use social media more effectively.

13 Years On Our Book Becomes an E-Book!

The book was published in 2001 but the conference it is based on was held in Boston in 1996! Anyway, the e-book is now online and the introductory chapter is open access.

Submissions to AJARE Way Up, Acceptance Rate Way Down

Really interesting data from the editors of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. It's unusual to see time series stretching back 15 years of submissions, acceptances, articles published etc. for a journal. The page budget today is slightly higher than in 1999 but less than what it was in 2000. The number of articles published though actually doubled. But submissions tripled. In the last year half of new submissions have been desk rejected.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of AJARE on Commodity Booms

Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE)
Special issue on Resources and Energy Commodity Cycles: Maximising the Benefits of Resources and Energy Commodity Cycles

Focus
The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AJARE) is publishing a special issue on managing mining and energy commodity cycles for publication in 2015. Submissions are welcomed.

The economic effects of commodity cycles in mining and energy sectors are a major policy topic in resource-rich countries. This Special Issue will follow a previous special issue on Mining and Resource Economics in the journal in 2012, which has been very highly cited.  Submissions to the Special Issue should be focused on identifying and analysing economic drivers and impacts, as well as evaluating different policy mechanisms available to manage and ameliorate boom and bust cycles.

It is planned that the Special Issue will be released in print form in April 2015. It is anticipated that an associated Symposium or workshop on the topic will be held in Australia in early 2015 to engage policy makers in the research findings.

Timeline
·         Issue Call – March 2014
·         Submissions due – 15th of September 2014
·         Manuscript selection – 30th of September 2014
·         1st round Reviews Due – 15th of November 2014
·         Review process completed – 31st of January 2015
·         Early bird publications – 28th of February 2015
·         Issued in print form – April 2015

Sample topic areas
·         Resource rents and taxation
·         Sovereign wealth funds
·         State roles to achieve benefit maximisation
·         Labour force transformations in the mining sector
·         Indigenous and remote area employment
·         Productivity growth over a commodity cycle
·         Positive and negative spillovers to other sectors / technology / workforce issues
·         Impacts of price and investment boom on exchange rates, interest rates and other sectors
·         Managing the transitioning from the peaks of resources and energy booms
·         Historical overviews of past commodity cycles
·         Managing conflicts over land use and environmental tradeoffs
·         Providing infrastructure, housing and services to resource regions
·         Economics of energy efficiency
·         Measuring and predicting price and investment cycles
·         Stranded capital and resource assets
·         Sustainable mining
·         Resource extraction and environmental tradeoffs
·         Coal and gas market analysis
·         Economics and regulation of unconventional gas
·         Energy demand and supply analyses

Editors  
The special issue will be coordinated by Professor John Rolfe (Central Queensland University) and Professor Quentin Grafton (Australian National University), with additional support from the AJARE Editorial team. Further information about the Special Issue can be sourced from Professor John Rolfe (Email: j.rolfe@cqu.edu.au / Phone: 61 (7) 4923 2132).

Early advice about intentions to submit would be welcomed. This can be done by emailing a prospective title and abstract to Professor John Rolfe (j.rolfe@cqu.edu.au).

Submission
Guidelines for authors and the process to submit an article to AJARE. 

Special Issue of Energies: Call for Papers

Energies is an open access journal on all topics relating to energy. I have agreed to be the guest editor of a special issue on energy transitions and economic change. The journal is indexed in both the Web of Science and Scopus with an impact factor of 1.844 (5 year IF = 2.087) and a SNIP of 1.296 (SJR = 0.543). I am looking for contributions on all topics related to energy transitions past, present, and future (the theme of my current funded research project) and related economic changes. I'm looking for a broad interpretation of energy transition to include not just changes in energy carriers used but also in the scale of energy use. Some of the topics that could be covered are:

• economics of new renewable energy technologies
• energy efficiency and the rebound effect
• energy ladder in developing countries
• historical energy transitions (biomass to coal, coal to oil etc.)
• role of energy in economic growth
• energy and climate change
• energy security
• peak oil
• economics of unconventional fossil fuels

 But this is just to give you an idea of the type of papers we are looking for. The deadline for submissions is 15 July 2014 but early submissions that pass the refereeing process before that date will be published before then.

I look forward to some interesting submissions and will update the blog with progress.

Librello Publishing

Librello Publishing is a new open access publisher with a model somewhat similar to PeerJ. But while PeerJ has lifetime memberships that then allow you to submit as many papers as you want (for $299 membership and one or two papers a year for the discount classes), Librello is using annual memberships of 156 Swiss Francs. As its five journals are mostly in the social sciences this higher pricing is necessary as the average number of authors is lower. In practice this will likely amount to the submission fee which many subscription journals already charge. For example, the Energy Journal requires you to either pay USD 100 per submission or be a member of the IAEE. Assuming a 50-70% rejection rate this is still very much below the pricing of a conventional open access journal like PLoS ONE, which is only profitable because it operates on such a huge scale. However, this looks to be a totally legitimate publisher with a respectable editorial board for the Challenges in Sustainability journal.