As I head across to New York to participate in the High Level Political Forum, I thought it would be interesting to share some work done by my friends at measuresHE that explores academic publishing.
A few months ago they introduced a new approach to evaluating journals, one that went significantly beyond simplistic (and misleading) measures like the journal impact factor.
And that made me wonder: what would happen if you took the same approach, but looked at the SDGs rather than traditional academic subjects?
Of course this is a much more challenging thing to think about.
- SDG-focused research will often be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.
- The categorisation of publications into the SDGs is much more subjective than traditional subjects.
- Regional influences become even more important, as different solutions are sought and different drivers for impact are defined.
Very kindly Billy Wong and David Watkins decided to give it a go, and I am pleased to be able to share the result.
Towards a more perfect analysis
The approach taken by David and Billy definitely deserves consideration. First, they use data taken from OpenAlex, and its classification of papers in relation to the SDGs. Then they explore seven different aspects of excellence for each journal:
- deep network impact
- the average quality of papers in the journal
- the average quality of the strongest papers in the journal
- volume of publications
- institutional diversity of participating authors
- institutional diversity of citing authors
- how open the journal is.
What next?
The 17 lists produced aren’t perfect, but they do give a good starting point for discussion. You can explore them on the measuresHE SDG Journals 100 site. So please let us know what you think.
Is this a useful contribution to academic SDG publishing? What other factors could be important in evaluating journals for the SDGs? And how can we turn this into a useful resource for researchers?
First published on LinkedIn.
