flynn002

Elsevier, the publisher of Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD) and Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD) is no stranger to controversy. It became the focus of a campaign in 2012 because of its pricing strategies and restrictive practices. Elsevier responded that the prices it charged were fair because of the added value it brought to the publishing process. Among other things they claimed that: " We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers ." Well, the claim of added value is exploded by the recent revelations of goings-on at RASD and RIDD as documented in my recent blogposts here and here . One of the points to emerge from a detailed scrutiny of publications data is that not only was there evidence of the editor publishing numerous papers in his own journal: in addition, he was frequently bypassing the peer review process altogether. Evidence on this point is indirect, because the pu...

The H-index is a metric that was devised to identify talented individuals whose published work had made a significant impact on the field (Hirsch, 2005). One of its apparent virtues was that it was relatively difficult to game. However, analysis of publications in a group of journals in the field of developmental disabilities suggest there has been a systematic and audacious attempt at gaming the H-index by a cabal of editors. What's the evidence for this claim? Let's start by briefly explaining what the H-index is. It's computed by rank ordering a set of publications in terms of their citation count, and identifying the point where the rank order exceeds the number of citations. So if a person has an H-index of 20 this means that they've published 20 papers with at least 20 citations – but their 21st paper (if there is one) had fewer than 21 citations. The reason this is reckoned to be relatively impervious to gaming is that authors don't, in general, have much too...