Citation scores. Every year the ISI ‘Web of Knowledge’
bibliometric system counts how much articles published in
each of the journals it indexes are referenced across all its
journals in the social sciences and in the humanities.^3 (These
systems used to be known as the Social Science Citation Index
and the Humanities Citation Index, but have been rebranded.)
The Web of Knowledge’s coverage is heavily biased towards the
United States and towards English-language journals more
generally. It is very patchy in some particular fields like law,
where most UK or other overseas journals are not covered.
Despite these limitations, as in other walks of life, partial or
inadequate data like these are widely seen as preferable to no
data at all. Every serious academic wants to be noticed, and so
faute de mieux, the Web of Knowledge’s scores influence where
the academic ‘stars’ send their papers. They also are key ways in
which journals try to measure how well they are doing against
their competitors.
Despite all the elaborate arrangements for sifting and improv-
ing academic papers most current evidence shows that the
median journal article is referred to by nobody in the five years
after it is published, and very few articles have a referencing life
longer than this. In major bibliometric analyses (like the ISI
indices) the leading journals in most disciplines are those which
manage to achieve an impact score over or reasonably close to 1.
This means that on average each of their published papers is
referred to at least once in five years by some other paper in one
of the journals included in the analysis. Any journal with an
average citation score of more than 0.5 is also doing relatively
well. Many perfectly reputable journals may have citation scores
of below 0.25, meaning that papers there have a less than
one-in-four chance of being referenced by anyone else.
Circulation and journal type. The chances of anyone else
noticing your work partly depend upon how many people even
get to eyeball the journal where it has appeared. Large-circulation
journals are often those which are longest-lived in a particular
discipline. Having reached good world-wide library access long
ago (around 2000 to 3000 copies or above), they can to some
extent rely on inertial ordering and librarians’ concern for
continuity to shield them from current market forces. Often
these are ‘omnibus’ journals with rather a broad mission to
230 ◆AUTHORING A PHD