Rankings of academic publishers

Academic publishing is a global industry.^[1] Fifty-seven major publishing groups bring in a combined revenue of €59.328 billion.^[1]

Reed-Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis and Sage published more than half of 2013's peer-reviewed academic papers.^[2] Chinese, Brazilian and Russian publishers are entering the global market at an accelerated rate, challenging the dominance of traditional publishing houses.^[1]

Publications are often judged by venue, rather than merit.^[3] This has been criticized in the Leiden Manifesto^[4] and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. According to the manifesto, "Science and technology indicators are prone to conceptual ambiguity and uncertainty and require strong assumptions that are not universally accepted. The meaning of citation counts, for example, has long been debated. Thus, best practice uses multiple indicators to provide a more robust and pluralistic picture."^[5]

History

In a study assessing an increasingly-diversified array of publishers and their service to the academic community, Janice S. Lewis concluded that college and university librarians ranked university presses higher and commercial publishers lower than did members of the American Political Science Association.^[6] There are a number of approaches to ranking academic book publishers;^[7] rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations and a publisher's reputation and impact factor (particularly in the sciences). According to Colin Steele, a librarian at the Australian National Library in Canberra, "Listings of publishers by title also fail to take into account that some university presses are strong in certain disciplines, but not across the whole spectrum."^[8]

SENSE rankings

The Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE Research School) ranked scientific publishers in 2006.^[9] SENSE works in conjunction with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), in accordance with the standard evaluation protocol for Dutch universities. The school developed its ranking in conjunction with performance criteria for its staff. rating A, B, and C journals and A, B, C, D, and E publishers. A-publishers are ranking scheme,^[10] the "few top-notch international publishers"; B-publishers are "good international publishers";^[10] C-publishers are "decent international publishers and excellent national publishers";^[10] D-publishers are "professional publications published by major international organisations and good national publishers",^[10] and E-publishers are "publications mainly published for a non-academic general public by national organisations and small local publishers". The SENSE Ranking was recognized in bibliometric literature^[11] and other universities' attempts to rate publishers.^[12]

The latest SENSE ranking, like its previous rankings, is based on the subjective assessment of a publisher by prominent Dutch and international scientists. An Excel table is available at the school's website.^[9]

Spanish National Research Council rankings

In 2012 and 2014, the Spanish National Research Council asked 11,864 Spanish academics to name the 10 most prestigious academic publishers from over 600 international and 500 Spanish-language publishers. It received 2,731 responses, a response rate of 23.05 percent, asking them to name. Votes were counted in a complex mathematical procedure described at the ranking project's website.^[13] The results were:

1. Cambridge University Press
2. Oxford University Press
3. Springer Nature
4. Routledge
5. Elsevier
6. Peter Lang
7. Thomson Reuters
8. Blackwell
9. De Gruyter
10. McGraw Hill^[13]

Libcitation rankings

The Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS) at the University of New South Wales presented a quantitative methodology of bibliometric comparisons of book publishers.^[14] In a Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology article, Howard D. White et al. wrote: "Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology". The RIMS proposed what they called a "libcitation count", counting the libraries holding a given book as reported in a national (or international) union catalog. In the follow-up literature, comparing research units or even the output of publishing companies became the target of research.^[14][15] White et al. wrote,

Libcitation counts reflect judgments by librarians on the usefulness of publications for their various audiences of readers. The Libcitation measure thus resembles a citation impact measure in discriminating values of publications on a defined ground. It rewards authors whose books (or other publications) are seen by librarians as having relatively wide appeal. A book's absolute appeal can be determined simply by counting how many libraries hold it, but it can also be gauged in relation to other books in its subject class.^[14]

Libcitations, according to the RIMS, reflect what librarians know about the prestige of publishers, the opinions of reviewers, and the reputations of authors.^[14]

Other studies

To quantitatively assess the output of a publishing company, a research group associated with the University of Granada created a methodology based on the Thomson-Reuters Book Citation Index.^[16] The quantitative weight of the publishers is based on output data, impact (citations) and publisher profile. According to the Granada study, the 10 leading companies were Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Nova Science Publishers, Edward Elgar, Information Age Publishing, Princeton University Press, and University of California Press.^[16]

In a later study,^[17] Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch used six main indicators for 57 companies with data from the SENSE and the Granada studies. The study, which relied on the Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index, also used the Harvard Library ratio of books checked out to the total stock available in the catalog; the 2015 outreach of a company in typical scientific global cultures (Japan, Sweden and India); the presence of a publisher's output in international organizations such as the European Commission in Brussels (the ECLAS catalog) and the World Bank, and references to the company in newspapers such as the New York Times. A 2011 Tausch study analysed the library outreach of a company in the OCLC WorldCat.^[18]

See also

• Academic publishing
• Bibliometrics
• Citation impact
• Informetrics
• Publishing

References