astronomy

Rankings of academic publishers

Rankings of academic publishers is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Rankings of academic publishers rather than just read about it. In short: There are a number of approaches to ranking academic publishing groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its impact factor (particularly in the sciences).

Key takeaways

Rankings of academic publishers belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rankings of academic publishers to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rankings of academic publishers from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

There are a number of approaches to ranking academic publishing groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its impact factor (particularly in the sciences).

Ranking challenges Publications are often judged by venue, rather than merit. This has been criticized in the Leiden Manifesto 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." Moreover, studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank", contrary to widespread expectations. 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. 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." Rankings can vary widely by discipline.

Australian Political Science rankings The Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) ranked academic publishers in 2007, taking into consideration both book and journal publication. By 2022 this was replaced by a ranking of journal titles only. In 2007, their top-ranked (A+) publishers were:

Cambridge University Press University of Chicago Press Columbia University Press Harvard University Press MIT Press Oxford University Press/Clarendon (UK/US) Princeton University Press Stanford University Press University of California Press Yale University Press In 2007, their second-ranked (A) publishers were:

Alfred A. Knopf Allen & Unwin Cornell University Press Duke University Press Edward Elgar Elsevier Science Ltd IPA, Warsaw Johns Hopkins University Press Kluwer Manchester University Press Melbourne University Press New York University Press Palgrave MacMillan (UK and Australia, St. Martin's Press in US) Politico's Polity Press Routledge (Taylor and Francis) Sage Publishing Science Publishers Univ. of Pennsylvania Press University of Michigan Press University of Minnesota Press University of New South Wales Press University of Toronto Press WHO/EDM, Geneva Wiley-Blackwell AP, London Basic Books, New York Blackwell, Oxford Clarendon Press, Gloucestershire, UK CRC, Ghent, Belgium CRC, New York Harper & Row, New York John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, UK Pergamon Press, Oxford/Amsterdam Prentice Hall, Eaglewood Cliffs (NJ), US Random House, New York Springer, London/Berlin

SENSE rankings The Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE Research School) has ranked scientific publishers every year from 2006 until 2022. This ranking was intended for internal use only and is not anymore available.

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. Results were compiled using a weighted average. The results were:

Cambridge University Press Oxford University Press Springer Nature Routledge Elsevier Peter Lang Thomson Reuters Blackwell De Gruyter McGraw Hill IGI Global

Granada rankings To quantitatively assess the output of a publishing company, in 2014 a research group associated with the University of Granada created a methodology based on the Thomson-Reuters Book Citation Index. 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 University of California Press IGI Global

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

See also Academic publishing Bibliometrics Citation impact Journal ranking Informetrics Publishing

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rankings of academic publishers

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rankings of academic publishers claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rankings of academic publishers before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rankings of academic publishers ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rankings of academic publishers

In research: Rankings of academic publishers appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rankings of academic publishers in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rankings of academic publishers is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic publishing companies, Bibliometrics, Library science, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rankings of academic publishers outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Rankings of academic publishers in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rankings of academic publishers means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rankings of academic publishers out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rankings of academic publishers in simple terms?

Why does Rankings of academic publishers matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rankings of academic publishers?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rankings of academic publishers.