Review of "Influence of Publication Capacity on Journal Impact Factor for International Open Access Journals from China: Insights from Microeconomic Analysis"

Ludo Waltman

doi:doi:10.21428/7ccec04a.f8cc2558

As a signatory of Publish Your Reviews, I have committed to publish my peer reviews alongside the preprint version of an article. For more information, see http://publishyourreviews.org.

This paper presents an economic analysis of the landscape of open access journals in China. The paper provides recommendations that, according to the author, can be used by China “to enhance its open access journal landscape”.

I regret to say that I have significant difficulties understanding the paper. Below I discuss some of the problems I experienced while reading the paper. I hope this will help the author to improve the paper.

Sections 1 and 2 introduce the research presented in the paper. While there is a lot of useful information in these sections, I found it hard to distill from this information the objectives of the paper, or the research questions that the paper aims to address. My advice would be to define the objective of the paper, or the research questions, in a more explicit way.

Section 4 starts by discussing the ceteris paribus assumption. It seems to me that this assumption may be violated in a systematic way as a result of two developments. Firstly, SCI and SSCI have expanded their journal coverage over time. When new journals are added to SCI and SSCI, this will increase the JIFs of existing journals (because of citations from the newly added journals to the existing journals). Hence, an increasing time trend can be expected for JIFs. Secondly, the average number of references per article may have increased over time, which then results in journals receiving more citations and increasing their JIFs. I wonder how these developments may affect the analysis presented in the paper.

In Eq. (1) I don’t understand the multiplication of PUB and JIF. This assumes that revenue is proportional to JIF: A two times higher JIF leads to a two times higher revenue. I understand why a higher JIF leads to a higher revenue, but I don’t see why revenue should be proportional to JIF. For instance, I could imagine that a two times higher JIF leads to a 1.5 times higher revenue, or to a three times higher revenue, instead of a two times higher revenue.

In Section 4 I can follow the steps from Eq. (1) to Eq. (7), but I don’t understand how Eq. (8) and the subsequent equations are obtained. This also means I don’t understand how to interpret many of the results presented in Section 5.