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average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published” (Clarivate, 2020). JASA’s has almost doubled over the past five years, most likely due to our increased number of special issues and special content articles.
Ontheoppositesideofthe“timescale”spectrumistheCited Half-Life of a journal, which is the median age of the articles cited in a given year (Clarivate, 2020). JASA’s Cited Half-Life is over 16 years, which is very long. Thus, JASA articles per- form well over the long term in regard to citations.
There are other citation-based metrics of journal per- formance, such as the “Eigenfactor score” and “Article Influence Score,” that we monitor. I’ll simply say that we monitor metrics such as these mostly for “red flag” indicators such as lags behind other acoustics-related journals and, to date, we don’t see any.
John A. Colosi (JAC): Journal citations are one type of metric. Can you tell us about any other ways to evaluate the performance of journals?
JFL: Well yes, there are other measures that consider practitioners and other readers of a journal’s content who may not publish or cite articles but certainly read them and use them.
There are so-called “altmetrics” for gauging impact, which include, e.g., downloads, mentions on social media/blogs, and news coverage. An important altmet- ric is usage, which includes abstract views and full-text downloads. JASA has done great with these measures.
Over the years, both have grown for JASA, and in 2020, there were ~5,300,000 abstract views and ~2,000,000 full- text downloads.
Another important area is our social media presence. We actively promote all our publications on social media, which is increasingly important, especially if you’re going to reach out to younger people, and our staff has greatly increased its efforts in this area recently.
Promotion and advertising of our content has become a very big piece of the “publication equation” nowadays, especially given the large amount of competition that exists. In a sense, the extent to which a journal promotes and publicizes its author’s articles also becomes a metric of journal perfor- mance. We are increasingly active in this area.
Timothy F. Duda (TFD): Citations and views are, of course, key for journal evaluation, but what about all- important review and publication speed?
JFL: Over the last five years, JASA has greatly reduced the time from submission to both first decision and accep- tance (Figure 3), and we now feel we are in a relatively good place concerning that particular metric. The slight increases in time during 2021 are almost certainly pan- demic related because authors, reviewers, and editors alike often needed more time, given the adjustments to their life that they were making for Covid. And even in normal times there will be some manuscripts that have problems, which means they are going to take extra time. That’s just part of the “handling time distribution curve.” We do take
Figure 3. Median and average days from first submission to both first decision (A) and accept decision (B) for JASA.
Winter 2021 • Acoustics Today 59