Work Description

Date: 23 September 2019

Dataset Title: Data from Editorial on Impact of Special Collections in JGR Space Physics

Dataset Creators: M. W. Liemohn & P. Wooden

Dataset Contact: Michael Liemohn liemohn@umich.edu

Funding: This work was supported by the American Geophysical Union.

Key Points:

--JGR Space Physics published 51special collectionsfrom 2006–2018, totaling 1009 papers out of 8881.
--Average citations and downloads are slightly higher for papers in special collections compared to those not in collections.
--Paper attributes thought to influence citationswere analyzed, finding no statistically significant effect for special collection papers compared to others.

Research Overview:
Journals occasionally solicit manuscripts for special collections, in which all papers are focused on a particular topic within the journal’s scope. For the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, there have been 51 special collections from 2005 through 2018, with a total of 981 papers out of the 8829 total papers in the journal over those years (11%). Taken together, the citations to these papers, as well as other metrics, are essentially the same as the non-special-collection papers. Several paper characteristics were examined to assess whether they could explain the higher citation and download values for SC papers, but they cannot. IN addition, indirect methods were conducted for assessing self-citations as an explanation for the increased citations, but no evidence was found to support this hypothesis. It was found that some paper types, notable Commentaries and Technical Reports have lower average citations but higher average downloads than Research Articles (the most common type of paper in this journal). This implies that such paper types have a different kind of impact than "regular" science-result-focused papers. In addition to having higher average citations and downloads, special collections focus community attention on that particular research topic, providing a deadline for manuscript submissions and a single webpage at which many related papers are listed. It is concluded that special collections are worth the extra community effort in organization, writing, and reviewing these papers.

Methodology:

Download data is retrieved from Wiley Journal Insights, a proprietary platform operated by Wiley and includes the number of times a paper is viewed in full text online or downloaded in PDF formats on Wiley Online Library; it includes download activity of the past five years of all papers published in the journal. Citation data is retrieved from Dimensions Analytics platform and includes citations by all content indexed in the Dimensions database. Citating publications can include articles, chapters, preprints, or monographs. Download and citation data used in this analysis was retrieved 13 September 2019 and analyzed in Excel.

Instrument and/or Software specifications:
All analysis was conducted in Excel spreadsheets.

Files contained here:

There are two data files in this repository:

- Data_Supp_10-1029-2019JA027457_d01.csv: this file contains all submitted papers to JGR: Space Physics from 2005-2018. Submitted papers are confidential if they are rejected, so the manuscript number and other information connecting the paper to the authors has been removed and replaced with a unique key under "Key" column. This data is used to show submissionsions to special collections and all other papers. Blank cells indicate we do not have the associated data or it is an implied "N/A" (e.g., the year of publication of a rejected manuscript).

- Data_Supp_10-1029-2019JA027457_d02.csv: this file contains all papers published in JGR: Space Physics from 2005-2018and papers submitted in 2018 but published in 2019 (as of August 2019); however, we excluded from the plots shown in the article papers published in 2005 and 2019. The column labeled "Key" corresponds to the accepted papers in "Data_Supp_10-1029-2019JA027457_d01.csv." File d02 contains article identifying information since published papers are public information, including title, submission number, and DOI. Blank cells indicate that either we do not have the associated data or it is an implied "N/A."

Related publication(s):
Liemohn, M. W., & Wooden, P. (2019). Editorial: Impact of special collections in JGR Space Physics. Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics, to be submitted 2019.

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

To Cite Data:
Liemohn, M. W., & Wooden, P. (2019). Data for the Editorial Impact of special collections in JGR Space Physics [data set]. University of Michigan Deep Blue Data Repository. DOI TBD.