Rejected article tracking – now with added citation counts!

Here at DataSalon, we’re always monitoring industry trends and acting on feedback from our clients, in order to develop our products and ensure that they meet user requirements. The latest improvement to our PaperStack service resulting from this process is the addition of citation counts to the rejected article tracking module.

The rejected article tracking module was added to enable editorial staff to discover the subsequent fate of the articles rejected by their journals – whether they were later published elsewhere and, if so, in what journal and with which publisher. A flow diagram gives a summary of this data for all articles across the publisher’s entire journal portfolio, which users can filter for more specific insights, and from which they can click down through the levels to view journal lists, article lists, and individual article details.

Now, in addition to the publication details we were already drawing from Crossref, we’re also retrieving citation counts and including that information in the article lists, so that users can see the total number of citations each subsequently published article has received. Using the number of citations as an indicator of the quality of the research, this offers an additional way of assessing whether the publisher has missed out on valuable articles that could have been accepted with further revisions or perhaps transferred to a more appropriate journal within the publisher’s own portfolio.

Of course, citations are only part of the picture, and they do have limitations as a measure of article quality – they take a while to build up, numbers will vary according to the field of research, and they’re open to abuse such as over-citation of the author’s own work or that of their colleagues. But by refreshing the counts monthly and bringing them together with all the other available information about the articles (publication date, journal, and details including a full list of authors and their affiliations), PaperStack supports informed evaluation of the peer review process and provides hard data to justify policy changes.

To find out more about how DataSalon can help you to track your own rejected articles and to improve your peer review process, please get in touch to request a PaperStack demo.