Ten Goslings, Six Plus Four: Who Will Get the Highest Score?

Abstract

Ten Goslings, Six Plus Four:Who Will Get the Highest Score? Heather Snell Jeunesse doesn't have any goslings, but it is the journal's tenth anniversary. Goslings appear in the title only as an homage to the Winnipeg spring, when thousands of newly hatched goslings are let loose on the city. Jeunesse also enjoys its tenth anniversary at a time when not just high numbers of goslings, but numbers, period, have increasingly come to dominate knowledge mobilization. Journals are increasingly judged by impact measures and academics by the prestige capital of the journals in which they choose to publish, a high impact factor being correlated with superior quality. Should they appear in a children's counting book, the ten goslings competing for the highest score are no doubt involved in harmless play; for Jeunesse, however, the stakes of not having good impact measures are high. "Who will get the highest score?" is perhaps an even more anxiety-inducing question given the rapid growth of children's literary and cultural studies and the increasing focus on young people in fields that have hitherto tended to ignore them. While Jeunesse is still pretty remarkable in its explicit focus on young people's texts and cultures and its willingness to publish interdisciplinary research, it is now one of many journals that publish scholarship on young people. Not only are other journals in the field publishing research on multifarious texts, but more and more journals focused on young people and young people's texts and cultures are also emerging. Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL), hosted by St. Catherine University's Master of Library and Information Science Program and University Library, is a case in point. The mission of RDYL is "to publish scholarship attending to issues of diversity, equity, social justice, inclusion, and intersectionality in youth literature, culture, and media" (RDYL). Jeunesse has some impressive competition, a fact that makes maintaining a high impact factor extremely challenging. Yet to think about Jeunesse as being in competition with other journals is, perhaps, to concede far too much to the cult of numbers that has come to [End Page 1] characterize neo-liberal capitalism in the twenty-first century. The editors at Jeunesse would prefer to think of the journal as one among many fine venues for scholars working in young people's texts and cultures. It is in this spirit that we celebrate our tenth anniversary at the same time as we remain conscious of the fact that not worrying about numbers manifests a certain degree of naiveté in a scholarly publishing industry that is more and more being driven by them. Despite our best efforts to be critical of how metrics are beginning to dominate scholarly publishing—a trend that mirrors an increasing orientation toward metrics in the larger society—our ability to publish work that contributes meaningfully to ongoing conversations around young people and the texts and cultures that emerge in their wake is at least in part shaped by metrics. A low journal impact factor (JIF), for example, may discourage scholars from submitting to Jeunesse. A low JIF may be particularly discouraging for early-career scholars whose chances of obtaining academic employment hinge increasingly on outstanding metrics. Mike Sosteric remarks that the development of Citation IQs could lead to a situation whereby "prestigious research institutions will feel most comfortable hiring someone who has demonstrated research potential—or whose 'potential' can be 'predicted' from early citation data" (805). At no other time has it been as important to think about one's score than in 2019. The pressure exerted on journals to be online and open access by government councils and other funding bodies promises to make scoring even more important: once all articles are published online, the score can govern every aspect of academia, from hiring to the granting of research funding. No longer will hiring committees, university administrators, and other academic brokers have to take more traditional, printed scholarship into account in their assessments. Despite continued trepidation about publishing online at a time when predatory journals are making it difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate research, there is a reluctance in many academic arenas to take printed...