Abstract
After 40 years of publication, we should consider not only our true impact as a journal on global health but also how we might measure that impact going forward. Academic journals like the Food and Nutrition Bulletin may have impact through multiple mechanisms, most obviously in a passive manner, through sharing of scientific and other knowledge to a wide audience, academic and other. A journal may also actively promote new directions in research and scholarship through calls for papers and open statements of interest in novel topic areas. Journals with a focus on translational science may have impact outside academia; for example, on development of public policy. A high-quality, peer-review process should actively support authors through careful cultivation and guidance of scientific expression and analysis. The editors of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin consider each of these categories of impact, and particularly the last, to be no less important than the simple publication of scholarship.
As has been stated and reiterated in editorials during the past year of anniversary celebration, the mission of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin is to build capacity for nutrition science as a foundation to food and nutrition policy, especially in developing countries. In response to this mission, which we feel is integral to our vision of impact through peer review, our editors welcome work by graduate students and young researchers from around the world and publish their work alongside research by the foremost names in international nutrition. More than half of the journal’s published authors in any given year are from developing countries, and in a typical year, the authorship spans 30 or more countries on 6 continents. All authors, regardless of tenure or location of scholarship, bring new insight into issues in the field of international nutrition.
We expect each article published in the Food and Nutrition Bulletin to have some generalizable import, however, and ask of our authors a high level of intellectual rigor. To reach a sufficient level of quality, some articles with a solid intellectual core still require a great deal of attention from reviewers and editors. Where some journals ask reviewers to identify what is novel in a manuscript, or other factors that may indicate likely future citation of the article, the Food and Nutrition Bulletin asks only that peer reviewers provide honest comments that will assist authors to revise and improve their research and writing. Even the two-thirds of manuscripts that are never published in our pages receive some level of review and comment. For those manuscripts that reach the level of priority for peer review, the journal’s Editorial Board and other regular reviewers, well aware of the journal’s dual mission, respond with enthusiastic support.
Peer review is not an entirely thankless task, but aside from annual acknowledgement in our pages and free access to our content, we have little with which to reward our reviewers, and particularly the Editorial Board on which we rely heavily. Despite this, our reviewers and editors dedicate many hours to each manuscript, often working with emerging authors through multiple revisions, beyond general comments and critical suggestions. They may identify useful references to include in a review, painstakingly outline effective ways to bridge a methodological gap, or identify flaws in study design that can be addressed through new analysis. We often find that for papers with not-insurmountable flaws, the authors are glad to accept a verdict of rejection alongside encouragement to resubmit in a new form. It is always a happy occasion in the Editorial Office when we receive a greatly revised resubmission of a previously rejected article, as it indicates to our editors that we are succeeding at our mission.
Within the publishing realm, measurement of a journal’s influence generally takes the form of citation indexes, which are arguably a proxy for impact through sharing of knowledge and, through it, replication or refutation of scientific findings. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF), formalized in 1969 as the number of citations in a year of articles published during the previous 2 years, is the oldest and most prominent among these. 1 Despite their common use, citation indexes are frequently criticized for lacking consistency and comparability between subject categories. 1 Density of publications in any given topic area can differ widely, for example; the half-life of an article is longer in some fields; and the average density of citations is higher in the biosciences than in mathematics. A specialty journal with few competing publications in its field that accept similar manuscripts will necessarily appear to be a failure in its citation-index category, for example, while a journal in a well-published field such as clinical medicine may achieve a high impact factor, relative to other disciplines, with only a handful of well-promoted pieces of research. The developer of the JIF noted that for these and other reasons, comparing journal performance in terms of citations requires adjustment for variables such as specialty, citation density, and half-life. 1,2
Despite its limitations, the JIF continues to be promoted as a universal index that many take to be an indicator of a journal’s quality. Recent research has found that 35% of studied research institutions in North American explicitly supported use of the JIF in review, promotion, and tenure decisions, and that a majority of these institutions associated it with publication quality. 3 This use of journal citation indexes as a measure of quality of an individual researcher’s work, and their use as a basis for hiring and compensation decisions, is alarming and counterproductive to promotion of effective scientific research.
We must acknowledge that the JIF succeeds in accomplishing its objective: within a given subject area, it is effective at identifying and ranking journals whose published articles are, on average, more widely cited than others. By ignoring broader impact of a journal’s activities on research and policy environments, and on the preparation of researchers and authors, however, citation indexes may be understood to capture only a narrow and specific vision of a journal’s impact. This consideration suggests that as a universal measure, the JIF is at best incomplete. Moreover, by tacitly encouraging publication of research that is likely to be cited by other authors, broad acceptance of citation indexes in scientific publishing may preferentially elevate authors whose names and work are well known and demote emerging authors and those whose research addresses very specific or limited regional or topical issues. 4
Given its unusual mission, the Food and Nutrition Bulletin therefore hopes to provide a useful forum for recognition for developing-world authors and scientists whose work may pass by the attention of journals focused on citation-based metrics. Increasingly, we also have placed a focus on the ways in which science translates to policy, both locally and internationally, in order to fill an essential gap in international nutrition publications. In future volumes, we will continue to identify essential areas such as these that lack a home for consistent publication. For example, in the year to come, we will seek out manuscripts that emphasize sustainability within nutrition and food systems, highlighting critical research at the intersection of global environmental health and public health nutrition.
In an effort to combat negative trends in measurement of journal impact, as Senior Associate Editor and Managing Editor of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin, the authors of this commentary have become personal signatories to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. In so doing, we have agreed to abide by the principles of the declaration, which has practical implications for how we define and interpret the impact of scientific publishing. We contest the use of citation-based journal metrics as a measure of the quality of an individual’s research or publications. We also reject the use of citation metrics to guide decisions on which manuscripts should be published. We believe that neither scientific inquiry nor the merits of its findings must be judged according to factors associated with its publication and dissemination.
As a journal, we have always embraced these tenets, and the Food and Nutrition Bulletin will continue to do so. Whenever possible, the journal provides waivers of publication charges for unfunded research, including studies using secondary data, doctoral thesis research, and research by developing country scholars whose institutions are unable to cover publication fees; although this work is unlikely to be cited, the editors of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin see it as immediately supporting the next generation of researchers. We have not and will never award fee waivers based on likelihood of future citation or similar metrics. As a journal, we have also committed to publishing outputs of research that represent impact beyond research articles; in addition to the written articles in our pages, this includes supplementary data sets and software in conjunction with associated articles as well as policy studies and multilateral consensus reports that document impact of science on policy and practice.
In 2015, the Food and Nutrition Bulletin contracted with SAGE Publications to produce our bound and online volumes. In so doing, the journal’s operations changed in many ways, not least of which was exposure to a range of new tools and concepts in publication that had emerged in the decades since our founding and which have since enabled us to expand our impact. For example, as a Research4Life consortium partner, the International Nutrition Foundation already made all Food and Nutrition Bulletin content available free and preferentially offered publication fee waivers to researchers in low-income countries. Our partnership with SAGE, which gave us access to its considerable digital footprint, has greatly expanded our readership in these regions. Through this partnership, we have also discovered new methods of tracking and communicating the impact of the scholarship we publish. For example, we now publish Altmetric scores for published articles directly on our web site; this score gives an indication of the article’s reach through social and mass media in addition to academic citation. SAGE has also spearheaded efforts to explore alternative metrics of publication quality and convened a high-level, multisector working group on the topic; in early 2019, they published a white paper summarizing key insights and recommended actions from the workshop. 5
In the interest of enabling free global access to the content of its thousand-plus journals, SAGE has committed to Plan S, which promotes a movement toward Open Access in all scholarly publishing. 6 A transition to Open Access is necessarily complicated for an old-fashioned journal such as ours (still printed on physical paper!); yet making content freely available to all, without embargo, is consistent with the mission of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin, and such a transition will therefore be a priority in the coming years. In the meantime, we will continue to explore alternative metrics of impact, such as the h-factor (a measure of an individual’s academic influence), and we will promote transparency and access for our readers and authors, including publication of internal peer-review metrics and streamlining of our submission guidelines and process.
In the 40 years of existence of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin, the landscape of academic publishing has undergone massive seismic shifts. The Editorial Office no longer receives typed (or hand-written) manuscripts by mail; peer review is now expected to take weeks instead of months (or more); readership has grown from the hundreds or thousands receiving our printed volumes to hundreds of thousands who download our articles each year; and our team now communicates and collaborates digitally, occupying offices in 5 cities in 3 countries. Despite these changes, each quarter for 4 decades, the journal has faithfully presented its readers with novel scientific research, policy analysis, systematic and narrative reviews, and reports of international meetings. The conclusion of this 40th year—in the middle of yet another seismic shift, as well-established journals must increasingly compete with new arrivals on the global stage, some with greater budgets for marketing than publishing, and others downright predatory—is a useful time to reflect on the position of the Food and Nutrition Bulletin within the larger space of academic publishing and the impact that one journal may have over 4 rapidly changing decades.
