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Do scientific publications by editorial board members have shorter publication delays and then higher influence?

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Abstract

It seems have become a common practice for the editorial board members to publish the publications in their “own” journals. In view of the important position of the board members, this article devotes to exploiting the difference of the publications by board and non-board members from the perspectives of publication delay and influence. The Journal of Informetrics and Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology are taken as the resulting representative of emerging and verteran journals. After extensive analysis, we find that (1) the scientific publications by board members have shorter publication delays than those by non-board members; (2) the first or corresponding authorship dominates among the publications by board members; and (3) compared to those by non-board members, the academic articles by board members have more influence on average in term of citation counts. This may be a Matthew effect for editorial board membership.

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Acknowledgements

This research received the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 72004012 and 72074014. Our gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Correspondence to Xin An.

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Xu, S., An, M. & An, X. Do scientific publications by editorial board members have shorter publication delays and then higher influence?. Scientometrics 126, 6697–6713 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04067-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04067-x

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