Public Understanding of Science – a peer-review journal for turbulent times (original) (raw)

2012, Public Understanding of Science

Scientific publications began as the exchange of polite letters among Gentlemen of Leisure interested in natural philosophy, during the period of the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 19th century saw the proliferation of national academies of sciences and societies for the advancement of science to the wider public. The formation of scientific disciplines was to follow, each with its own reviews for reporting new theories, observations and experiments to peers, and for critiquing the work of others in public debate. In the 21st century, this enterprise of scientific publication has grown to gigantic proportions-narrowly defined as "producing peer-review journal articles." Databases of scientific publications (Scopus, ISI, Eigen-factor) track something in the area of 12,000 scientific journals (for example Web of Science, 2009: 11,261 journals, of which about 1/5 are social science), and something in the area of 700,000 published papers per year (2009). Such estimates differ widely and depend on the database. Björk et al. (2009) put this figure at 1.35 million for 2006, and Scopus (at www.SCimago.com) puts this figure at over 30 million citable documents for 2010. However we count, the bulk of this production is still located in the USA and in Europe, but Asia and Latin America are catching up fast. And all this remains a conservative measure of the real scientific effort. Most tracking exercises have a bias towards English language, the lingua franca of modern science, leaving many linguistically conscious researchers with a tough dilemma between pride in the mother tongue or an international impact. Moreover, even within the English language context, databases are incomplete, and some journals exist "off map." With a total of 465 papers peer-reviewed and published between January 1992 and December 2010, Public Understanding of Science is clearly a small fish in this large publishing ocean, and also a small fish within its own world, the social sciences. All the same, PUS strives vigorously to support the work of researchers studying the modern scientific mentality in a global perspective. PUS works for its authors: the impact story so far Citations impact has become the currency by which to identify and trade information about academic journals, and academic researchers increasingly depend on it for their careers. But impact ratings come in many different forms and format. It is necessary to establish some perspective on the matter.