Readability and prestige in scientific journals

Readability and Prestige in Scientific Journals

Hartley, Trueman and Meadows [3] contribute useful evidence on whether scientists can gain prestige by writing in a manner that is difficult to read. This has been called the bafflegab theory by some. They concluded that the evidence was not strong. This comment examines some of the conclusions from Hartley, Trueman, and Meadows (HTM) and recommends directions for further research. Comments Pos...

Readability and prestige in scientific journals

I suggest a revised hypothesis for future testing. The revised hypothesis assumes a threshold effect for bafflegab. That is, prestige is related to complexity up to a certain level, beyond which there is no gain. One possible reason is that simple writing is not representative of what readers perceive as scientific writing. Alternatively, it may be that the reader's inability to understand the ...

The SJR indicator: A new indicator of journals' scientific prestige

This paper proposes an indicator of journals' scientific prestige, the SJR indicator, for ranking scholarly journals based on citation weighting schemes and eigenvector centrality to be used in complex and heterogeneous citation networks such Scopus. Its computation methodology is described and the results after implementing the indicator over Scopus 2007 dataset are compared to an ad-hoc Journ...

[Prestige and profitability of Spanish scientific journals depend on international use of their contents].

A further step forward in measuring journals' scientific prestige: The SJR2 indicator

A new size-independent indicator of scientific journal prestige, the SJR2 indicator, is proposed. This indicator takes into account not only the prestige of the citing scientific journal but also its closeness to the cited journal using the cosine of the angle between the vectors of the two journals' cocitation profiles. To eliminate the size effect, the accumulated prestige is divided by the f...