How international are your journals?

With technological advances, funding of research by international bodies, and increasing collaboration between scholars from different countries, journal publishing is now very much a global enterprise. Understanding and promoting geographical diversity of authors and reviewers is important in ensuring full coverage of research in a journal’s field, increasing its impact, and ensuring that its contributors reflect its readership.

The PaperStack report ‘Geographical Distribution of Submissions by Author/Reviewer Location’ allows you to monitor the geographical diversity of your authors and reviewers, either via a map view which offers an at-a-glance overview of hotspots and weak areas:

or via a chart view which provides the detailed figures:

The person chosen as corresponding author may vary according to discipline and/or institution – it could be the person most involved in the research (who is best-placed to answer questions) or the most senior researcher (who is more likely to have a permanent position and provide a consistent point of contact with the publisher). For that reason, it’s important to be able to see figures for all authors as well as just the corresponding authors – the report is interactive so that you can simply click on the key to remove one or the other set of figures from the chart:

When you switch to reviewers, there’s similar flexibility to distinguish between reviewers who were invited and reviewers who completed a review. This means that in cases where geographical diversity is poor, it’s possible to identify whether the issue originates in a limited pool of people from whom reviewers are being selected, or whether the problem lies in encouraging particular members of this pool to participate.

Geographical diversity may vary according to journal or subject area – for example, Middle Eastern studies might reasonably be expected to have more authors and reviewers from the Middle East than from other areas. So, as for all reports within PaperStack, this report can be broken down by journal or subject, allowing each to be judged according to the appropriate benchmarks:

To find out more about this report and other insights PaperStack can provide into your editorial process, and to request a full demo, please get in touch.