Publication delay adjusted impact factor: The effect of publication delay of articles on journal impact factor

Expedited editorial decision in COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant lockdowns have interrupted the way scientists live and work. This nevertheless caused an unforeseen impact of COVID-19: the pandemic substantially increased editorial speed. Here, we causally identify the impact of the pandemic on the editorial decision time, based on a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity (RD) design that compares (N = 339,199) papers submitted in the lead-up to and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that editors make acceptance decisions significantly quicker after the pandemic, reducing the editorial decision time of revised papers by 8.9 days on average. The pandemic, however, has unequal impacts on editors. The results reveal a larger reduction in editorial decision time for editors of high-tier journals, in the field of social science, or with busy work schedules. Finally, our findings also allude to the potential for the increase of editorial speed, and will stimulate policy changes in scientific enterprises that strive for accelerated publishing.

Research characteristics and trends of power sector carbon emissions: a bibliometric analysis from various perspectives

Power sector carbon emissions (PSCEs) have received an increasing attention due to their huge contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. Herein, the research characteristics and trends of PSCEs are investigated based on bibliometric analysis. The basic growth trends, contributions of the most productive countries/territories, institutions, authors, journals, and subject categories are analyzed systematically. In addition, the major research fields and research trends are investigated by the keywords co-occurrence analysis and topic evolution. The result indicates that PSCEs research has developed rapidly in the past 20 years, and the proportion of research funding has increased from 0 at the beginning to 73% in the last 5 years. Especially, the number of scientific publications has shown an explosive growth after the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The People's Republic of China (PR China), the USA, and England are the three most dynamic countries in the field of PSCEs research, with 64.8% of the total number of published papers. The most productive institutions are also from these countries. Based on keywords co-occurrence analysis, it is concluded that driving factors, prediction, impacts, and countermeasures of carbon emission are three major research fields. The result of thematic evolution indicates that the topics on energy transition, life cycle assessment, marginal abatement cost and energy policy have been the research hotspots in recent years. This study presents an worldwide overview of PSCEs research, thus helping the stakeholders to quickly grasp the research trends and conduct future work.

A study of the correlation between publication delays and measurement indicators of journal articles in the social network environment-based on online data in PLOS

The development of network technique and open access has made numerous research results freely obtained online, thereby facilitating the growth of the emerging evaluation methods of Altmetrics. However, it is unknown whether the time interval from reception to publication has an impact on the evaluation indicators of articles in the social network environment. We construct a range of time-series indexes that represent the features of the evaluation indicators and then explore the correlation of acceptance delay, technical delay, and overall delay with the relevant indicators of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections that are obtained from the open access journal platform PLOS. Moreover, this research also explores the differences in the correlations of the delays for the literature in six subject areas with the corresponding indicators and the discrepancies of the correlations of delays and indexes in various metric quartiles. The results of the Mann-Whitney U test reveal that the length of delays affects the performance of the literature on some indicators. This study indicates that reducing the acceptance time and final publication time of articles can improve the efficiency of knowledge diffusion through the formal academic citation channel, but in the context of social networking communication, an appropriate interval at a particular stage in the publishing process can enhance the heat of sharing, discussion, and collection of articles to a small extent, hence boosting the influence and attention received by the literature on the internet.

Factors, components and dynamics: investigation of journal self-citation and citation by equal opportunity model

The effectivity of journal impact factor (JIF) is questioned in evaluating academic players. Coercive self-citation was widely criticized and Clarivate annually suppressed journals with high journal self-citation (JSC) rates. Recently, some journals significantly increased their articles but their JIFs and JSC rates were diversified which lacks reasonable explanations. Here, we revealed the complexities of the dynamical interactions among different influence factors and different components of journal citation. Journal citation frequencies have strong correlations with JSC rates regarding citable items, significant correlations with numbers of journals' articles and negative significant correlations with JSC rates regarding total citations. Journal citation consists of JSC, intradisciplinary non-JSC and interdisciplinary non-JSC. JSC has the quickest dynamic and interdisciplinary non-JSC has the slowest dynamic while most journals are more cited by interdisciplinary citations. Journal citation is initially decided by the number of citable items. Journal's share (citing articles) in related disciplines influence JSC and intradisciplinary non-JSC positively and negatively, respectively. Multiple citations promoted by the increase in articles, the skewness of the topic profile, preference-related self-citation and anomalous self-citation are of benefit to citation. The complex dynamical interactions result in increment effects of the number of articles acting on JIF, which is stronger for JSC and citable items. The increase in articles also promotes intradisciplinary non-JSC when the journal's shares in related disciplines are low. This process will be reversed after the journal's shares become high enough which may finally decrease its impact factor. It is quicker for the journal with a stronger intradisciplinary citation. The calculational results of the average JIFs of selected journals agree with the statistical results. In addition, we can explain the related situations of some journals. Finally, we suggested that the JSC rate in terms of citable items should be considered for judging the level of JSC.