This in reply to an inquiry sent to ISI ...
-------------------
Thank you for contacting Thomson Scientific Technical Support.
I've gotten some additional detail on how letters are classified for Web
of Science.
The policy is to use several criteria for deciding whether to classify
an item as a letter or an article; it is not simply if it's in the
Correspondence section, it is a letter.
The criteria for a Letter classification, besides being in a
Correspondence or Letters section, include such things as whether it is
in a traditional letter format (To the Editor, etc), whether it refers
primarily to previous articles, etc.
**If an item appears to be more original research, with a number of
cited references, etc., it will be classified as an Article.
In summary, the classification process does allow for judgment based on
the specific item. Many such items in journals like Nature and Science
are routinely classified as Articles, not Letters.
-------------------
As an example, Physical Review Letters has published 671 items in 2007
(thru 3/7/2007) and 621 are classified as ARTICLES. The rest are
comments on previously published articles and errata notices.
Dana L. Roth
Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32
1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125
626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540
dzrlib_at_library.caltech.edu
http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 4:01 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Journal Length Constraints
[Identity Deleted] wrote:
> I came across the following:
>
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5499.html
>
> I'd just like to add that journals have other means to "coerce"
> authors into unsatisfactory practices. I submitted a formally written
> report to a reasonably strong journal (IF>2.0) it was accepted with
> minor revision. the referee requested some small changes in grammar,
> and clarification of some details.
>
> the editor of the journal then asked us to re-submit our paper as a
> letter to the editor. the journal's policy was that reports were
> 1000-1200 words, and letters were under 500 words. as such, we had to
> do a complete re-write, despite the fact that our paper had been
> deemed satisfactory (with minor revision) by the referee.
>
> letters do not count against an ISI Impact Factor...
Thank you for your message and you may be right that relegating some
accepted articles to letter status not only cuts their length but may
also cut their usage and citations, which indirectly affects the
journal's impact factor.
Journals have annual page-count limits, for economic reasons (I know
that, as I edited a journal for 25 years), forcing them to accept fewer
papers, and shorter ones, than they might have preferred.
The remedy in the Open Access era is (1) for authors to self-archive not
only the shortened published version, but, prominently hyperlinked, the
original full version too (and any revisions, corrections and updates).
ISI is not the only citation counter now: There is citeseer, citebase,
google scholar, and soon scopus and others.
So (2) the journal can and should ask ISI to count letter citations too
(many journal have their "letters" indexed in ISI, e.g. Physical Review
Letters); but soon ISI citation counts (already very incomplete) will be
supplemented by a wealth of other citation counters, and many other
rich, new online measures of research impact:
Shadbolt, N., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2006) The Open
Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable, in
Jacobs,
N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects.
Chandos.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12453/
And finally, (3) journals are already adopting the practice of printing
shorter versions on paper, but archiving longer online versions,
including extended figures and even data. This will cover the economic
limitations on hard-copy length. Once all journals have converted to
online-only and OA, and have offloaded all text-generation,
access-provision and archiving functions onto the global network of
OAI-compliant OA Institutional Repositories, then of course all length
limitations will be gone and all downloads, citations and other measures
of usage and impact will be properly counted and credited.
But journal selectivity will remain: Journals will still be quality
controllers and certifiers, implementing the peer review, requiring
revision and correction, and certifying the the fact that an accepted
paper has successfully met their established quality standards. This
necessarily entails high selectivity and rejection rates for the
journals that are at the high end of the journal quality hierarchy. (And
that is precisely the function of journals and peer review in the OA
era.)
Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Mar 08 2007 - 02:56:05 GMT