Published online Nov 21, 2022. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v28.i43.6168
Peer-review started: October 8, 2022
First decision: October 20, 2022
Revised: October 27, 2022
Accepted: November 10, 2022
Article in press: November 10, 2022
Published online: November 21, 2022
Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF) is often used to evaluate the relative reputation and quality of academic journals in their respective fields. It can greatly influence the quality and scope of subsequent manuscript submissions. Few studies have focused on the impact of the integrity of the editing and publishing process on improvement of the JIF of academic journals.
This study introduces and discusses the editing and publishing processes of Baishideng’s journals in their entirety, as they form the basis for our objective of safeguarding and bolstering integrity in academic publication.
This study aimed to explore the importance of the integrity of the editorial and publication process in improving the academic influence of academic journals and JIF of academic journals.
In this paper, we describe our statistical analysis of bibliometric factors, such as the 2021 JIFs released in the Journal Citation Report™ 2022, discipline rankings, received and published articles in 2019-2021, and webpage visits and downloads for seven journals published by Baishideng Publishing Group (Baishideng) and indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded™. The editing and publishing processes of Baishideng’s journals in their entirety were introduced and discussed, as they form the basis of safeguarding and bolstering integrity in academic publication.
For the seven journals assessed, their 2021 JIFs were basically unchanged from 2020. The 3012 articles published in 2019-2020 were cited by more than 20000 articles from approximately 8000 academic journals, including many journals with JIFs > 10. Baishideng’s journals have been widely recognized for their academic quality. The numbers of manuscripts received and published in 2021 are both higher than those in 2019-2020. The numbers of webpage visits and downloads received by the seven journals have increased year by year. The visitors were from all around the world. From 2019 to 2021, a total of 5543 open access articles were published in the seven journals, of which 2083 (37.6%) were invited and published free-of-charge. In addition, the quality of the articles was further evaluated through Baishideng’s article quality, author evaluation tracking and reader evaluation systems.
The findings from these bibliometric assessments indicate that establishing, promoting and actively practicing processes that safeguard and bolster the integrity of the editing and publication process also help to improve the academic influence of academic journals, which itself is the cornerstone for improving JIF.
How to address the low success rate of peer review; how to improve the quality of manuscript peer review; how to avoid peer reviewers’ misconduct more effectively, including attempts to force authors to cite the peer reviewer’s own published articles, plagiarizing the author’s articles, etc; how to avoid falsified ethical approval documents and language certificates more effectively; how to effectively avoid improper authorship or falsified signature on copyright license agreements; and, how to effectively train academic editors and science editors are still challenges and require further research in the future.