Abstract
The publication of special issues constitute an important yet underinvestigated phenomenon of scholarly communication. In an attempt to draw attention to the proliferation of special issues, Priem (2006) suggested that their commissioning has an underestimated opportunity cost, given the relative scarcity of publication space: by distorting the “marketplace for ideas” through the commanding of preselected topical distributions, special issues undermine the total research output by “squeezing out” high-quality but topically unrelated articles. The present paper attempts to test this hypothesis by providing a topicality and research impact analysis of conference-based, monographic, and regular issues published between 2010 and 2015 inclusive and indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The results show that the titles and abstracts of articles copublished are topically closer to each other than those copublished in regular issues, which suggests that their relative importance might influence the total topical distribution. However, disciplinary and overall comparison of relative citations for both special and regular issues shows that intraissue averages and variances in the former case are respectively higher and lower than in the regular issue context, which undermines not only the abovementioned hypothesis, but also the belief that editors often “fill up” special issues by accepting substandard papers.
Highlights
As scholarly communication is increasingly shaped and driven by journal publications (Cope & Phillips, 2014; Wakeling et al, 2019), special issues (SIs) play a significant and lasting role in both knowledge production and dissemination
The share of MonoSIs obviously exceeds that of ConfSIs, both issue types represent the lesser part of journal issues
The interdisciplinary variability in the proportion of SIs is noteworthy: one out of a little more than three arts issues is a MonoSI, that proportion drops to more than one out of 15 issues in the case of biology; in parallel, the publication frequency of ConfSIs for physics is one for 38.31 issues, whereas that number drops to one ConfSI for each 454.54 issues published in psychology
Summary
As scholarly communication is increasingly shaped and driven by journal publications (Cope & Phillips, 2014; Wakeling et al, 2019), special issues (SIs) play a significant and lasting role in both knowledge production and dissemination. An SI can be defined as a journal issue “either completely or partly devoted to a single topic” Pervading the scholarly communication system as a whole, SIs can originate from various procedures. Some special issues are generated from open calls for papers on a specific topic. Some special issues are comprised of articles from authors who were invited to write for them Some special issues are comprised of articles from authors who were invited to write for them (Conlon, Morgeson, McNamara, Wiseman, & Skilton, 2006, p. 859)
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