About assessing journals

[statenth]

How one can judge that a journal is prestigious or highly credible? As a student lacking academic training and experiences, I prone to see the indicators or citation-related scores. I think that publishing papers in journals like Annals of Statistics, JASA, JRSS, Biometrika, or Biostatistics is an honorable milestone in a scholar's life, but, I am wondering what other aspects can be considered besides checking the visible scores or undoubtedly accepting given convention in the academia. Thank you in advance for broadening my insight, or even two cents you wouldn't mind sharing!

Edited February 28, 2021 by statenth

[Stat Assistant Professor]

I think that's pretty much it. Reputation of journal/conference, impact factor, and number of citations are all the "standard" metrics. So besides the 'top' journals (AoS, JASA, Biometrika, JRSS-B), you'll also see some high-quality work in places like Statistical Science (e.g. the original paper on GAMs appeared in Statistical Science), Biometrics, Biostatistics, Statistica Sinica, Annals of Applied Statistics, Technometrics, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Bayesian Analysis, etc.

[Stat Assistant Professor]

Another metric to assess this is the acceptance rate of the journal/conference. The most prestigious venues will have lower acceptance rates. That's partly why the folks who publish a lot in conferences list the acceptance rate on their CV -- to indicate how highly selective it was.

[trynagetby]

Thanks @Stat Assistant Professor this information is invaluable for people choosing a program. Just out of curiosity what is considered a "good" volume/year of publications  at these venues? I've been researching professors I'd be interested in working with a noticed that some of them have had a significant drop-off in publishing volume for the past few years. Should this be a red flag?

[Stat Assistant Professor]

3 minutes ago, trynagetby said:

Thanks @Stat Assistant Professor this information is invaluable for people choosing a program. Just out of curiosity what is considered a "good" volume/year of publications  at these venues? I've been researching professors I'd be interested in working with a noticed that some of them have had a significant drop-off in publishing volume for the past few years. Should this be a red flag?

I would look more into it. Some faculty do not update their webpages very frequently, so they may have not just updated their website and/or CV. If they have a Google Scholar page, then that might be a good place to check to make sure that they are still being reasonably productive.

For top journals, the publication pace can be a bit slow -- partly because there are often multiple rounds of revisions (e.g starting with "reject with encouragement to resubmit," then "major revision" if the first revision was satisfactory, etc.), and also because they give the authors one year to submit/resubmit. Given this, I wouldn't consider one -- or even two -- years without any publications in press/published to be a huge red flag, as long as the work is "in revision" for quality journals. However, if it is more than 2 years with *nothing* (no preprints or new papers in press), then that is potentially concerning. However, before jumping to conclusions, I would check to make sure that this is really the case, and not just the faculty member failing to keep their personal website and publicly available CV up-to-date.

[statenth]

25 minutes ago, Stat Assistant Professor said:

I would look more into it. Some faculty do not update their webpages very frequently, so they may have not just updated their website and/or CV. If they have a Google Scholar page, then that might be a good place to check to make sure that they are still being reasonably productive.

For top journals, the publication pace can be a bit slow -- partly because there are often multiple rounds of revisions (e.g starting with "reject with encouragement to resubmit," then "major revision" if the first revision was satisfactory, etc.), and also because they give the authors one year to submit/resubmit. Given this, I wouldn't consider one -- or even two -- years without any publications in press/published to be a huge red flag, as long as the work is "in revision" for quality journals. However, if it is more than 2 years with *nothing* (no preprints or new papers in press), then that is potentially concerning. However, before jumping to conclusions, I would check to make sure that this is really the case, and not just the faculty member failing to keep their personal website and publicly available CV up-to-date.

I think this is quite frequent. Even some young or recently appointed assistant professors seem to be lagged in track of their newest publications or study on their cv / website. Thank you for the good point. I guess checking google scholar together helps a lot.

Edited February 28, 2021 by statenth

[Stat Assistant Professor]

15 minutes ago, statenth said:

I think this is quite frequent. Even some young or recently appointed assistant professors seem to be lagged in track of their newest publications or study in their cv / website. Thank you for the good point. I guess checking google scholar together helps a lot.

And even after a journal article gets accepted, it might take another year to get it published in a volume (due to the backlog of other accepted articles before it that haven't yet been published). So for an Annals of Statistics, JASA, or JRSS-B paper, you could be looking at three years from initial submission to publication.  That's why some faculty opt to publish some of their work in conferences -- the review times and revision times are all in a fixed time window before the actual conference, and then the proceedings are published shortly after that. Journals are often a bit more thorough than conferences IMO (though nobody denies the quality work in some of these conferences, journal articles go through a much lengthier process, so they often contain more simulation studies and empirical analyses, more theorems, more exhaustive treatment of the problem, etc.) 

So yeah, I definitely recommend checking the faculty webpages, CVs, Google Scholar, and arXiv (https://arxiv.org/multi?group=grp_stat&%2Ffind=Search) to make sure that they are being reasonably productive even if they don't have a lot of new papers in press/published on their CV. It's not super uncommon for there to be a year with no publications followed by a year with like, 5-6 papers (the faculty who have multiple papers *every* year likely have a ton of collaborators, postdocs, and PhD students working with them). So definitely check to make sure the faculty are at least revising their work and putting out new work (i.e. preprints).  

Edited February 28, 2021 by Stat Assistant Professor