Author publication preferences and journal competition

The processes that authors use to publish their papers in journals can be analyzed in terms of field-specific practices. How they select targeted publications can influence competitive relationships among journals. In this paper, the author quantifies the publishing choices of a set of scholars to confirm this ecological perspective. The results indicate a strong focus on a small number of journals. A measure of author publishing choices was used to define four ecological characteristics: coverage, coreness, exclusivity, and journal overlap. Several types of journals indexed in the Information Science and Library Science section of the Journal Citation Reports are compared in terms of their ecological characteristics. The data show that some journals cover large numbers of authors, but compete with other journals in subcommunities. Some journals with author profiles similar to those of high-ranking journals lost potential submissions. Others with low coverage, high coreness, and high exclusivity were found to have groups of “fans” who used them for all of their submissions, but still exhibited a strong need to sustain their exclusivity. It is hoped that the method and results presented in this paper will provide useful information for editorial boards interested in managing their submissions according to author profiles.