PONE-D-21-27877More journal articles and fewer books: Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010’sPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Olejniczak,

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• Reviewer #3 suggests being clearer about what your research question is in the abstract and at the start of the article.  This reviewer also suggests reducing and tightening the literature review.

I encourage you to consider how these and the other points noted in the reviews might improve your article.

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: While I doubt the results of this study will be a surprise to most researchers in social science fields over the past decade, I have never seen data on these facts collected and analyzed before. To the best of my knowledge, the analysis is correct and, with two small caveats, meets the PLOS One standards for publication.

The first issue with the paper is that the Academic Analytics commercial database should be described in more detail. As this is a commercial database, it is unlikely to be familiar to most researchers, and without a little bit more detail it is difficult to put the results into context. In particular, should we think of the data as containing the universe of all faculty, only those faculty with a publication, only faculty from a subset of institutions, or only a sample of faculty? Are the same faculty included in multiple waves of the data, and if so, might a panel data structure allow the authors to say more about how an individuals’ publication behaviors are changing over time? The number of departments is rising over time (Table 1). Is this due to the creation of new academic departments, or to the Academic Analytics database obtaining more complete coverage over time? Answering these kinds of questions is important for interpreting the results.

Second, the authors make frequent references to new generations of researchers showing different publication patterns. Methodologically, the paper needs some discussion of the age-time-cohort issues: are we observing differences across generations, differences within individuals as they age, or a secular change over time. The fact that both junior and senior faculty publish more papers and fewer books would lead me to believe that this is a secular change in publication practices rather than a generational issue, although the effect is larger for younger researchers. In general, it is not possible to separately identify age versus cohort versus time effects, and so the authors should be even more careful when describing this set of results.

Reviewer #2: I appreciated having the opportunity to review the manuscript titled “More journal articles and fewer books: Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010’s”. In the paper, the author(s) examine a structural shift in the social sciences whereby academics have concentrated more of their effort on journal publications rather than books. Using a relatively new and unique dataset, the authors are able to bring important new facts to bear about how scientific research is disseminated and rewarded. Although I enjoyed reading the manuscript and found the set of stylized facts quite interesting, I did find there to be room for improvement and additional clarification. Below, I have detailed some suggestions about how to address these concerns.

Major Points:

• An expanded discussion of the dataset is critical. Although the authors cite Academic Analytics as the source, it is unclear whether these data contain both the faculty rosters or publication data or both. Regardless, it seems critical to explain how these data are generated and how the rosters are linked with the bibliometric data. How do these data compare in terms of bibliometric standards like WoS or MAG? How are issues like entity resolution and disambiguation resolved?

o Are the publications strictly peer-reviewed research articles? Other datasets like WoS and MAG typically include a litany of other things including proceedings, editorials, cases, reviews, etc.

o Confused about the “two snapshots” description of the data b/c there appears to be a panel dimension in both figures 1 and 2. Thus, I am pretty puzzled about the structure of the underlying data.

• As I see it, there are effectively four possible things changing over the time period: (1) norms in academia, i.e. papers vs. books; (2) the number of people working in various fields; (3) an increasing in “teaming” a la Ben Jones (2021); and (4) individual productivity. I think it would be fruitful to try to hold some of these things constant so we can learn something more definitive. For instance, would the author’s result hold if the author(s) controlled for the fact that people just might be on more papers b/c of “teaming”? What about if the author(s) controlled for productivity? I expect either of these things could easily be done by simply renormalizing the data and would go a long way in terms of convincing me that the proffered explanation is the correct one.

Minor Points:

• Confidence intervals on the figures out be nice.

• Figure 1 is far too busy and the legends are missing

• Bibliometric databases are usually not very good at cataloguing books. Should we be concerned with that?

Reviewer #3: Review of “More journal articles and fewer books: publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010s”

This is an interesting and, as far as I can tell, technically sound analysis.

I think the overall finding is quite striking. My only suggestions are to (1) provide a bit more information on the data generating process (CVs, external databases, or both?) and sampling frame for AA; (2) think about reducing the lit review starting on line 66 a bit (which is a bit long and meandering); (3) up front (and in the abstract) state clearly what the research question(s) is/are and why important. Finally (4) some information on the growth of the number of journals over this period may be useful background, as would any information on changes in the academic book market and/or tenure guidelines.

One may also consider doing some panel analyses to examine “within individual” changes over time. Are the individuals who stopped publishing books now publishing journal articles, or aging out of the publication process (or academe)? This may also help inform some of the compositional discussions on the bottom of page 21 (lines 368-370).

Some discussion of what is gained/lost in the move from books to journals, or a least an overview of the relevant issues, would also be interesting to bring into the last section. Such as discussion (to the extent there is an active debate about the pros/cons) could also help motivate the analyses up front.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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More journal articles and fewer books: Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010’s

PONE-D-21-27877R1

Dear Dr. Olejniczak,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

All three reviewers are clear that you have addressed their concerns about the initial version of the article.  Reviewer #1 does suggest some further potential improvements or clarifications that you should consider as you prepare your manuscript for publication. 

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Joshua L Rosenbloom

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Overall, I am quite pleased with the authors revision to the manuscript. The more detailed description of the data is extremely helpful to the reader. I also greatly appreciate the analysis that restricts attention to departments and authors that were in both 2011 and 2019, as this helps to understand what is driving the observed effects.

I would still like to know a bit more about the database. For instance, what fraction of CrossRef articles are successfully matched to academic authors? If the match rate is less than 100%, what is likely causing the failures to match? A brief description of how Baker & Taylor operates and how comprehensive they are would be useful as well. As a reviewer, I always want more information about the data, and while these extra details would be nice to have, to my mind they are not strictly necessary to have a publishable article.

The few comments that are essential to address, in my opinion, are minor issues in the writing to clarifying some of the language to avoid confusion and to accurately reflect the limits of the data and analysis. Specifically:

-Some of the language about whether the effects are driven by within-individual changes or changes in the composition of authors are confusingly worded, especially in the Abstract where there is less context. For instance, the abstract reads, “The increase in article publication and decrease in book publication largely represents individual authors publishing more articles and fewer books, respectively, rather than `book authors’ transitioning to become `article authors’ en masse.” The terms “book authors” and “article authors”, and the idea that one transitions between them, are not intuitive to me. I suspect there may be clearer ways to indicate that the effects are driven by the intensive margin rather than extensive margin. For instance, why not just say something like “Individual authors publish more article and fewer books, but the fraction of authors who publish at least one article increases only slightly and the fraction of authors who publish at least one book decreases only slightly.” (I’m not a stickler for exact wording, but the current terms were confusing to me.)

-The authors note that “Changes in the number of departments in each discipline over the 9-year period may reflect the creation of new departments at the universities studied, but it may also reflect an increased scope of data collection in the AcA database” (pg. 10). But when discussing changes in International Affairs and Public Administration/Policy departments, the authors write that “Growth in both the number of scholars and number of departments in these disciplines suggests that American research universities strategically grew these areas of study both through investment in new faculty hires and by establishing new academic departments” (pg. 15). Given the caveat in the first quote, it doesn’t seem that the authors can conclude anything about what causes changes in the number of scholars and departments and the claim should be qualified accordingly.

Reviewer #2: Excellent work addressing the comments. The revised version of the manuscript is cohesive and makes a nice contribution to the literature.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Matthew B. Ross

Reviewer #3: No