The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Communication

Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello, Stefania M. Maci, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch, Michael J. Zerbe, Gabriel Cutrufello, Stefania M. Maci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000528091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Given current science-related crises facing the world such as climate change, the targeting and manipulation of DNA, GMO foods, and vaccine denial, the way in which we communicate science matters is vital for current and future generations of scientists and publics.

The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Communication scrutinizes what we value, prioritize, and grapple with in science as highlighted by the rhetorical choices of scientists, students, educators, science gatekeepers, and lay commentators. Drawing on contributions from leading thinkers in the field, this volume explores some of the most pressing questions in this growing field of study, including:

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• How do issues such as ethics, gender, race, shifts in the publishing landscape, and English as the lingua franca of science influence scientific communication practices?

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• How have scientific genres evolved and adapted to current research and societal needs?

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• How have scientific visuals developed in response to technological advances and communication needs?

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• How is scientific communication taught to a variety of audiences?

Offering a critical look at the complex relationships that characterize current scientific communication practices in academia, industry, government, and elsewhere, this Handbook will be essential reading for students, scholars, and professionals involved in the study, practice, and teaching of scientific, medical, and technical communication.

Part 1

Scientific research, writing, and publishing

1

The scholarly publishing landscape

Ken Hyland

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043782-3

Introduction

The last 50 years have seen, perhaps more than at any time since the invention of the printing press, massive changes in scholarly publishing. There has been an explosion of journals, papers, and researchers with the globalization of research and the insistent demands of publishing metrics on scholars across the planet. The period has also witnessed the increasing specialization of journals; the concentration of publishing into fewer corporate hands; the growth of multiple, even mega authorship; an increasing strain on the review system with a decline in the reviewer pool; the move to online publishing; the diversification of publishing genres; and the dominance of English as the international language of scholarship. This increasingly crowded and competitive academic marketplace has created an environment in which plagiarism, salami slicing of studies, and paper retractions have all increased. It has also generated a new breed of publisher, established on the basis of the ‘writer pays’ gold open access model, which threatens research standards and publishing ethics by guaranteeing publication following cursory ‘peer review’. This chapter discusses this new landscape.

The massification of academic publishing

Once the preserve of gentleman scholars with private means and a desire for self-improvement, academic publication is now an enormous industry that dominates the professional lives of academics across the globe. It is thought that as many as nine million scholars are working in 17,000 universities seeking to publish in English-language journals each year (Björk et al., 2009) with some 10,000 publishers generating revenues of US$25 billion annually (Johnson et al., 2018). The number of papers produced is also staggering, with over 3 million new peer-reviewed articles each year (Johnson et al., 2018). When the US$3 billion scientific book market is added to this and the growing volumes of poor-quality research published in predatory (or fake) journals, we can see that academic publishing is a significant academic and financial force.

This is a time of unprecedented growth in academic publishing. There are now more journals, more scholarly papers, more publishers, more coauthorship and, crucially, more academics, many writing in a language which is not their native tongue (Hyland, 2015). Both the number of articles and the number of journals have grown steadily for the past 350 years, with the greatest increases in recent times. Bornmann and Mutz (2014), for instance, have identified three phases in the development of scientific communication, with growth rates tripling in each phase: from less than 1% per year up to the middle of the eighteenth century, to 2–3% up to the 1930s and 8–9% to 2012. The global scientific output is now doubling every nine years. In 2018, there were about 33,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals plus 9,400 non-English-language journals (Johnson et al., 2018). One of the largest journal publishers, Elsevier, reported over 2 million articles submitted and 1 billion consumed in 2019 (Page, 2020).

One key factor in this expansion has been the migration to online publication and the retrospective digitization of earlier hard copy content, greatly increasing access to the scientific literature while reducing cost per unit. The main driving force, however, is the number of publishing academics worldwide. The latest UNESCO statistics report 7.8 million full-time equivalent researchers in 2013, an increase of 21% since 2007, or around 4–5% per year (UNESCO, 2017). The World Bank puts the total at 8.9 million, with most of the increase among emerging economies as countries recruit scholars to expand their higher education system to gain a foothold in the global ‘knowledge economy’. But while publications in non-English-language journals count as part of a country’s output, these have dramatically lower numbers of citations.

The fact that English is the language of the overwhelming majority of journals listed in prestigious bibliographic databases means that most publishing authors are now writing in a second language. This is a development viewed with alarm by some journal editors concerned with standards of written English. Visibility, of course, is all-important, and statistics show that academics all over the world are increasingly less likely to publish in their own languages and to find their English language publications cited more often. While many academics recognize that a lingua franca assists the exchange of ideas more effectively than a polyglot system, there is serious concern about the dominance of English on two main fronts: first, that it is accelerating the decline of alternative languages of scholarship, leading to domain loss for many languages, and second that it excludes many EAL (English as an additional language) writers from publishing, thus depriving the world of knowledge developed outside the Anglophone centers of research. This is, then, a politically charged and complex area.

The biggest driving force in the growth of academic publishing, however, has been the quantification of research outputs as a basis for funding and career advancement. The globalization and commercialization of the academy mean that researchers have found themselves in a culture which measures ‘productivity’ in terms of the number of papers they produce and the citations they receive on those papers. The promotion and career opportunities of scholars across the globe are increasingly tied to an ability to gain acceptance for work in high-profile journals. There are also financial rewards, with many universities in China and Iran offering substantial sums to encourage academics to publish in international journals indexed in the Web of Knowledge SCI databases, with inducements of up to $165,000 for a paper in Science or Nature, a sum 20 times that of a newly hired professor (Na & Hyland, 2016; Wei et al., 2017).

These pressures clearly impact academic life in important ways, reducing, for example, the time that can be devoted to editing journals, reviewing papers, mentoring students, and teaching. This intensive measurement regime also means that scholars must spend their time scrambling to publish whatever they can manage rather than in developing significant research agendas, sometimes leading them to sacrifice detailed, longitudinal, and novel studies for shallowness, repetition, and trending topics. This has also led to a process known as ‘salami slicing’, or fragmenting single coherent bodies of research into as many publications as possible. This sidesteps strict editorial policies against duplicate publication by breaking a single research paper into their ‘least publishable units’.

Another strategy, growing in the sciences, is the use of ‘publishing pacts’ where researchers work as a team and add each other’s names to papers which they may not even have read, let alone written. Interestingly, the number of authors per paper doubled from 1.8 to 3.7 between 1954 and 1998 (Mabe & Amin, 2002), and the Economist (2016) found the average number of authors per paper in Scopus grew from 3.2 in 1996 to 4.4 in 2015. There are numerous reasons for this, from increased specialization, technology, and social media links, but with all authors of a paper getting equal ‘credit’, pressures on academics to increase their outputs is certainly one of them. In addition to such ‘guest authoring’, the career rewards now associated with publishing have increased a variety of dubious practices such as plagiarism and a black market of ‘paper selling’ which offers authorship of papers written by ghost authors and accepted by SCI journals (Hvistendahl, 2013). Retractions of papers by journals are also increasing (retractionwatch.com), although they remain relatively rare, with only about four in every 10,000 papers affected.

Publishing practices: journals, books, and blogs

The appraisal culture and the massive increase in the number of journals have encouraged a shift away from book publishing, a relentless drive toward ever greater specialization, the strengthening of journal status hierarchies, and the imperative to reach new audiences.

The market for books in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has shrunk dramatically in recent years, with income from growing but much smaller e-book sales yet to replace it. There has also been a decline in citations to books (RIN, 2009). While books are important in the humanities and social sciences, with up to 75% of citations to monographs in some fields (Zuccala & van Leeuwen, 2011), there has also been a decline in the popularity of books in the soft knowledge fields (RIN, 2009). So, in 1980 a scholarly publisher could expect to sell 2,000 copies of a history book, but this had declined to 200 by 2005 (Dalton, 2008). Today a book is doing well if it sells 200 copies in its first year.

The rapid pace of modern scholarship, as well as the desire to focus on very specific topics, means that shorter treatments become increasingly important. Classicists now have over 100 journals to choose from, for example, and historians well over 1,000 (SJR www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php). The culture of evaluation makes authoring monographs less attractive as not only are there considerable difficulties in measuring their ‘quality’, but institutional auditors typically value three or four articles more than a book. In addition, the fact that articles are online makes them both more available and more visible, especially as publishers now aggressively promote them through e-mail ‘alerts’ to readers. Many publishers, in fact, have moved to ‘article-based publishing’, putting papers online as they are ready without waiting for an issue to be compiled. Navigation to articles is increasingly driven by search rather than browsing, so, having found relevant content through a search engine, specialist database, or their library’s online catalog, researchers spend very little time on publisher websites, dipping in to collect what they need for later reference.

Although journals are being undermined by article-based publishing, the popularity of their content remains undiminished. The Review of Higher Education, one of the field’s most prestigious publications, for example, temporarily suspended submissions in 2018 due to a two-year backlog of articles awaiting publication. Journals not only remain the main vehicle for disseminating and archiving knowledge, but their position has been strengthened by the rise of evaluation systems which assign a value to an article by the quality of the journal in which it is published. There is, of course, a hierarchy of journals. Ninety percent of cited research is published in just 10% of journals, while...