Health and medical researchers are willing to trade their results for journal prestige: results from a discrete choice experiment

  1. Natalia Gonzalez Bohorquez
  2. Sucharitha Weerasuriya
  3. David Brain
  4. Sameera Senanayake
  5. Sanjeewa Kularatna
  6. Adrian Barnett

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    In this article the authors use a discrete choice experiment to study how health and medical researchers decide where to publish their research, showing the importance of impact factors in these decisions. The article has been reviewed by two reviewers. The reviewers consider the work to be robust, interesting, and clearly written. The reviewers have some suggestions for improvements. One suggestion is to emphasize more strongly that the study focuses on the health and medical sciences and to reflect on the extent to which the results may generalize to other fields. Another suggestion is to strengthen the embedding of the article in the literature. Reviewer 2 also suggests to extend the discussion of the sample selection and to address in more detail the question of why impact factors still persist.

    Competing interest: Ludo Waltman is Editor-in-Chief of MetaROR working with Adrian Barnett, a co-author of the article and a member of the editorial team of MetaROR.

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Abstract

The research community's fixation on journal prestige is harming research quality, as some researchers focus on where to publish instead of what. We examined researchers' publication preferences using a discrete choice experiment in a cross-sectional survey of international health and medical researchers. We asked researchers to consider two hypothetical journals and decide which they would prefer. The hypothetical journals varied in their impact factor, formatting requirements, speed of peer review, helpfulness of peer review, editor's request to cut results, and whether the paper would be useful for their next promotion. These attributes were designed using focus groups and interviews with researchers, with the aim of creating a tension between personal and societal benefit. Our survey found that researchers' strongest preference was for the highest impact factor, and the second strongest for a moderate impact factor. The least important attribute was a preference for making changes in format and wording compared with cutting results. Some respondents were willing to cut results in exchange for a higher impact factor. Despite international efforts to reduce the importance of impact factor, it remains a driver of researchers' behaviour. The most prestigious journals may have the most partial evidence, as researchers are willing to trade their results for prestige.

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  1. MetaROR

    In this article the authors use a discrete choice experiment to study how health and medical researchers decide where to publish their research, showing the importance of impact factors in these decisions. The article has been reviewed by two reviewers. The reviewers consider the work to be robust, interesting, and clearly written. The reviewers have some suggestions for improvements. One suggestion is to emphasize more strongly that the study focuses on the health and medical sciences and to reflect on the extent to which the results may generalize to other fields. Another suggestion is to strengthen the embedding of the article in the literature. Reviewer 2 also suggests to extend the discussion of the sample selection and to address in more detail the question of why impact factors still persist.

    Competing interest: Ludo Waltman is Editor-in-Chief of MetaROR working with Adrian Barnett, a co-author of the article and a member of the editorial team of MetaROR.

  2. MetaROR

    In "Researchers Are Willing to Trade Their Results for Journal Prestige: Results from a Discrete Choice Experiment", the authors investigate researchers’ publication preferences using a discrete choice experiment in a cross-sectional survey of international health and medical researchers. The study investigates publishing decisions in relation to negotiation of trade-offs amongst various factors like journal impact factor, review helpfulness, formatting requirements, and usefulness for promotion in their decisions on where to publish. The research is timely; as the authors point out, reform of research assessment is currently a very active topic. The design and methods of the study are suitable and robust. The use of focus groups and interviews in developing the attributes for study shows care in the design. The survey instrument itself is generally very well-designed, with important tests of survey fatigue, understanding (dominant choice task) and respondent choice consistency (repeat choice task) included. Respondent performance was good or excellent across all these checks. Analysis methods (pMMNL and latent class analysis) are well-suited to the task. Pre-registration and sharing of data and code show commitment to transparency. Limitations are generally well-described.

    In the below, I give suggestions for clarification/improvement. Except for some clarifications on limitations and one narrower point (reporting of qualitative data analysis methods), my suggestions are only that – the preprint could otherwise stand, as is, as a very robust and interesting piece of scientific work.

    1. Respondents come from a broad range of countries (63), with 47 of those countries represented by fewer than 10 respondents. Institutional cultures of evaluation can differ greatly across nations. And we can expect variability in exposure to the messages of DORA (seen, for example, in level of permeation of DORA as measured by signatories in each country, https://sfdora.org/signers/). In addition, some contexts may mandate or incentivise publication in some venues using measures including IF, but also requiring journals to be in certain databases like WoS or Scopus, or having preferred journal lists). I would suggest the authors should include in the Sampling section a rationale for taking this international approach, including any potentially confounding factors it may introduce, and then adding the latter also in the limitations.

    2. Reporting of qualitative results: In the introduction and methods, the role of the focus groups and interviews seems to have been just to inform the design of the experiment. But then, results from that qualitative work then appear as direct quotes within the discussion to contextualise or explain results. In this sense though, the qualitative results are being used as new data. Given this, I feel that the methods section should include description of the methods and tools used for qualitative data analysis (currently it does not). But in addition, to my understanding (and this may be a question of disciplinary norms – I’m not a health/medicine researcher), generally new data should not be introduced in the discussion section of a research paper. Rather the discussion is meant to interpret, analyse, and provide context for the results that have already been presented. I personally hence feel that the paper would benefit from the qualitative results being reported separately within the results section.

    3. Impact factors – Discussion section: While there is interesting new information on the relative trade-offs amongst other factors, the most emphasised finding, that impact factors still play a prominent role in publication venue decisions, is hardly surprising. More could perhaps be done to compare how the levels of importance reported here differ with previous results from other disciplines or over time (I know a like-for-like comparison is difficult but other studies have investigated these themes, e.g., https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515209585). In addition, beyond the question of whether impact factors are important, a more interesting question in my view is why they still persist. What are they used for and why are they still such important “driver[s] of researchers’ behaviour”? This was not the authors’ question, and they do provide some contextualisation by quoting their participants, but still I think they could do more to contextualise what is known from the literature on that to draw out the implications here. The attribute label in the methods for IF is “ranking”, but ranking according of what and for what? Not just average per-article citations in a journal over a given time frame. Rather, impact factors are used as a proxy indicators of less-tangible desirable qualities – certainly prestige (as the title of this article suggests), but also quality, trust (as reported by one quoted focus group member “I would never select a journal without an impact factor as I always publish in journals that I know and can trust that are not predatory”, p.6), journal visibility, importance to the field, or improved chances of downstream citations or uptake in news media/policy/industry etc. Picking apart the interactions of these various factors in researchers’ choices to make use of IFs (which is not in all cases bogus or unjustified) could add valuable context. I’d especially recommend engaging at least briefly with more work from Science and Technology Studies - especially Müller and de Rijcke’s excellent Thinking with Indicators study (doi: 10.1093/reseval/rvx023), but also those authors other work, as well as work from Ulrike Felt, Alex Rushforth (esp https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-015-9274-5), Björn Hammerfelt and others.

    4. Disciplinary coverage: (1) A lot of the STS work I talk about above emphasises epistemic diversity and the ways cultures of indicator use differ across disciplinary traditions. For this reason, I think it should be pointed out in the limitations that this is research in Health/Med only, with questions on generalisability to other fields. (2) Also, although the abstract and body of the article do make clear the disciplinary focus, the title does not. Hence, I believe the title should be slightly amended (e.g., “Health and Medical Researchers Are Willing to Trade …”)

  3. MetaROR

    This manuscript reports the results of an interesting discrete choice experiment designed to probe the values and interests that inform researchers’ decisions on where to publish their work.

    Although I am not an expert in the design of discrete choice experiments, the methodology is well explained and the design of the study comes across as well considered, having been developed in a staged way to identify the most appropriate pairings of journal attributes to include.

    The principal findings to my mind, well described in the abstract, include the observations that (1) researchers’ strongest preference was for journal impact factor and (2) that they were prepared to remove results from their papers if that would allow publication in a higher impact factor journal. The first of these is hardly surprising – and is consistent with a wide array of literature (and ongoing activism, e.g. through DORA, CoARA). The second is much more striking – and concerning for the research community (and its funders). This is the first time I have seen evidence for such a trade-off.

    Overall, the manuscript is very clearly written. I have no major issues with the methods or results. However, I think but some minor revisions would enhance the clarity and utility of the paper.

    First, although it is made clear in Table 1 that the researchers included in the study are all from the medical and clinical sciences, this is not apparent from the title or the abstract. I think both should be modified to reflect the nature of the sample. In my experience researchers in these fields are among those who feel most intensely the pressure to publish in high IF journals. The authors may want also to reflect in a revised manuscript how well their findings may transfer to other disciplines.

    Second, in several places I felt the discussion of the results could be enriched by reference to papers in the recent literature that are missing from the bibliography. These include (1) Muller and De Rijcke’s 2017 paper on Thinking with Indicators, which discusses how the pressure of metrics impacts the conduct of research (https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvx023); (2) Bjorn Brembs’ analysis of the reliability of research published in prestige science journals (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00376/full; and (3) McKiernan’s et al.’s examination of the use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31364991/).

    Third, although the text and figures are nicely laid out, I would recommend using a smaller or different font for the figure legends to more easily distinguish them from body text.

  4. Version published to 10.31219/osf.io/uwt3b on OSF Preprints