PaperStack: shining a spotlight on diversity

There are many reasons why it’s important for a journal to have good geographical diversity of authors and reviewers, such as increasing the quality and coverage of research, ensuring that its contributors reflect its readership, and improving article citations and impact factor.

The PaperStack report ‘Top 10 Countries by Number of Submissions’ allows you to see at a glance the ten countries from which the most submissions originate.

Figures for several years are displayed in the same bar chart, showing how submissions from a particular country have varied over time, and you can view the top ten countries for different years – making it easy to judge the success of strategies for improving diversity.

Given increasing international cooperation between scholars, it’s important to be able to see figures for all authors, not just corresponding authors, and you can easily change from one to the other. Similarly, you can switch between invited reviewers and reviewers who actually submitted a review – so you can explore not only the diversity of the pool from which reviewers are selected, but also whether more needs to be done in order to encourage particular members of that pool to participate.

As with all PaperStack reports, you can filter by journal or subject area, allowing each set of figures to be judged on its own merits – it would be reasonable, for example, to expect a larger percentage of Middle Eastern Studies authors and reviewers to come from that part of the world.

Each bar on the chart is clickable, so that you can view or download the full set of articles to explore the detail behind the headline figures. Has the number of submissions from a particular country improved, only for a larger percentage of them to be rejected? Are manuscripts from a particular country requiring more revisions than the average?

To find out more about how this and other PaperStack reports can help inform your diversity strategies, please get in touch to request  a demo.