Smaller, more specific academic journals hold more sway over conservation policy

Scientists don’t just want their results to be published; they want them to be published in the most influential journal they can find. This focus on a high impact factor is driven by their concerns about promotion and tenure, but it may be overlooking the important role that smaller publications can play in the advancement of their science.

A new paper, titled “Role of low-impact-factor journals in conservation implementation,” and appearing in the journal Conservation Biology, upends some assumptions about the importance of a journal’s readership and impact factor.

The new study, by lead author and doctoral candidate, Jonathan J. Choi and other researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, compares scientific journals of higher and lower visibility and describes their influence on conservation. Specifically, Choi and his colleagues focused on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and demonstrated the crucial value of smaller, specialized science publications.

They found that the journals specific to a region or a particular kind of organism often play an outsized role in establishing legal protections for an endangered species. Journals focused on ferns, clams, or coral reefs had proportionally more of their articles cited by the federal government when protecting species than more prominent, higher-impact journals.

“The Endangered Species Act represents one of the most potent tools in the U.S. toolbox,” said Choi. “An endangered species can stop major construction projects and shut down industries, which can be a big political problem. So, in the ’70s, Congress required that an agency use the ‘best available science’ before it listed a species for protection. My question was about where that science came from, and how it compared to what we value in academia.”

Scientific journals are often measured by “impact factor” (IF), which loosely tells researchers how often an article is cited by other research in the first two years of its publication. Though it was originally intended as a tool for librarians to understand which journals were the most widely read, it has since been used as a proxy for the influence of the underlying research.

For this study, Choi and colleagues reframed the definition of “impact” by using a different metric: which journals were cited, and how often, in supporting the federal government’s listing of a species for federal protection. The team combed through the listing decisions data from the second Obama Administration (2012-16). During this period, 260 species were added to the list, more than during other administrations in recent history.

They found 13,000 supporting references to list species as endangered. Of those, more than 4,000 references were to academic journals. By calculating the number of times each journal was cited in the government listings the same way the academic impact factor is calculated, the team was able to assess the journals’ importance to federal conservation implementation.

They were surprised to find that a disproportionate number of academic articles referenced in ESA listings came from “low impact-factor” or “no impact-factor” journals. For example, research was more often cited from journals like the American Fern Journal and Ichthyology & Herpetology than from Nature or Science.

Publications with a larger footprint can offer cutting-edge science that sets new theory, but it’s the small journal that provides granular detail. The naturalist stepping through old-growth forest collecting fern samples is the most likely to observe subtle species and habitat changes on the ground and find an outlet in a specialized journal willing to publish a species-specific article.

Co-author Brian R. Silliman, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at the Nicholas School, noted the foundational work of the small journals, which are often under financial strain compared to for-profit journals. Given the higher likelihood of these smaller journals to influence conservation agencies like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Silliman called upon academic departments “to expand their criteria of important contributions to look at not only impact factor, but how many times a paper is cited by practitioners that are applying their work.”

“If young researchers feel a lot of pressure to only shoot for high impact-factor journals, what kind of research isn’t getting published?” Choi asks. “What conservation questions aren’t getting explored? The kind of research that gets published in Nature and Science is still important, novel, and cross-cutting, but what we’re saying is that small journals haven’t always received the kind of credit for the conservation-oriented science they produce. That contribution should be celebrated and recognized within the academy.”

In addition to Choi and Silliman, co-authors included Patrick N. Halpin, Professor of Marine Geospatial Ecology at Duke, and Duke alumni Leo Gaskins, Joseph Morton, Julia Bingham, Ashley Blawas, Christine Hayes, and Carmen Hoyt.