Reliability of scholarly journal acceptance rates
| Published date | 03 December 2018 |
| Pages | 7-8 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-07-2018-0044 |
| Date | 03 December 2018 |
| Author | Mohammad R. Khosravi |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Library & information services |
Reliability of scholarly journal acceptance rates
Mohammad R. Khosravi
Some topics regarding acceptance
rates of scientific journals need to be
more specified when a journal provides
the rate itself for its authors and readers.
In general, there are some ways to find
acceptance rate which might be useful
and relatively reliable (University of
Michigan Library, 2018). But
nowadays, the easiest, fastest and
maybe the best way is to inform the rate
by journals (or their publishers) through
websites and online services. Informing
acceptance rate publicly is indeed based
on publishing policies of journals and
publishers, so in some cases, it may be
required to obtain the information using
a personal communication with editors,
and however, it is possible that we
cannot collect any information with
respect to the rate in many journals. The
focus of this brief paper is on the
journals which share the information
with their audiences publicly or via
personal communications. The
acceptance rate (AR) is a main factor of
each journal which can be a key point in
selecting that journal by its audiences
while they are submitting articles or
wish to read scientific works. This can
also be used as one rationale in
determining if a library should
subscribe to a journal. Correspondingly,
a same factor for rejection rate (RR)
may be defined as RR =1AR.
I believe that there are journals
indexed in Web of Science and Scopus
which disseminate ambiguous ARs for
their audiences such that some ARs
are completely far from an expected
valueforaprofessionalresearcherora
journal editor with sufficient
experiences in the field (these persons
can qualitatively analyze AR of a
journal in comparison to other similar
journals considering indicators of
Scientometrics and Altmetrics, being
open access or subscription-based,
etc.) and there are also related studies
such as (Sugimoto et al., 2013). I think
that the root of the ambiguity refers to
this fact that many journals don’t
specify a public definition to show
how to compute the AR. As follows,
two different forms of the AR are
seen. In the equations below, a paper
with a complete editorial process
(CEP) is a paper considered for peer-
review process. In addition, it is better
if only peer-reviewed papers are
considered for AR computation,
namely some editorial materials and
similar published items without
review should be excluded:
ARi¼
Number of accepted papers received in a known period
Number of all received papers in that period
ARii ¼
Number of accepted papers received in a known period
Number of all papers handled through a CEP in that period
ARiii ¼
Number of peer reviewed accepted papers received in a known period
Number of all papers handled through a CEP in that period
These are just three forms which can be
defined, for example, some journals
may consider different periods (one
year, two years, five years) or other
types of AR may be defined based on
the difference between any two cases
from rejection, retraction and
withdrawal in steps of handling papers
or even after publishing. In this regard,
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 10 2018, pp. 7-8, V
CEmerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-07-2018-0044 7
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