CONTRIBUTION OF EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS TO JOURNAL’S SCHOLARLY OUTPUT

Abstract

Editorial board members (EBMs) of academic journals have been frequently studied for better understanding the principles of their functioning, impact on editorial policy, publication ethics, and entire scientific progress. One of the promising trends is to quantitatively evaluate the contribution of EBMs to the scholarly output of parent journals. This paper represents the results of the study on publication activity of editorial board members of the Russian Library and Information Science journals. To detect a share of papers by EBMs in the journal’s scholarly output, we studied a share of EBMs papers in parent journals and other sources. Generally, we detected the active participation of EBMs in increasing scholarly output of parent journals. We also studied the publication activity of foreign members of EBMs in Russian journals that turned out to bedramatically low. Formal involvement of foreign researchers to enhance the level of journal’s internationalization may explain this situation. It is shown, that the fact of publication fails to significantly impact on journal’s ranking positions. The scientific quality of EBMs papers has proved to be of higher value: in case of high quality of EBMs papers, the number of readers and citations start to increase. On the other hand, uncited papers by EBMs have the lowest or even negative effect on the journal’s rank. The findings can be of interest to editors-in-chief and founders of academic journals.