Publication web project
November 15th, 2008
Received an email from publiweb.redpath at mcgill.ca?...
What is that?
Claire de Mazancourt and I are conducting an extensive email survey in the scientific community. All authors who have published an article in the past three years as corresponding author potentially receive an email. Only journals from the field of Biological Sciences and referenced by ISI Web of knowledge are concerned. If you have published many articles you may receive several emails, but we ensure that any email box receives at most five emails. We use the publiweb.redpath mailbox specifically to conduct the survey.
The question
We are interested in the fluxes of articles among scientific journals. They define a network of interactions between journals. Such a network presents an interesting analogy with ecological, and particularly trophic, networks. We also think it has the potential to reveal interesting aspects of the publication process. (The picture above represents a radom network generated with Mathematica)
How does it work?
Asking the authors is the only way to get the relevant data. Authors are invited to reply an email, indicating whether the journal in which they published their article was the first they targeted. If no, we only ask the name of the previous journal they targeted (not the complete sequence of submissions).
This information is rather innocent and replying represents a minimum investment of time, so we hope most authors will collaborate and answer our email. Thank you very much if you did!
Since the replies will be analysed automatically, please follow the instructions we give in the email: either reply without typing any text, or simply type the character "@" followed by the name of the journal.
Do not add text, ask questions, give details, or attach the pdf of your article. Our program will be puzzled otherwise...
Of course, all replies will be analysed anonymously.
Calendar
The survey has just begun. All emails will be sent by the first week of december. Replies will be analysed in early February 2009.
Interested?
We are looking for a McGill student interested in analysing the data with us next year, as an independent research project. Contact us for more information!