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Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

> Basically no academics care what the literal name or publisher of the journal are.

This is patently false. Some universities and even governments enforce whitelists of reference publications, and each researcher is evaluated based on how many papers he manages to publish on them. Failing to meet quotas has a negative impact on the researcher's evaluation and ultimately may result in termination. Researchers may not care if a paper they read was from GloriousJournal or ModestPublication or even arxiv, but researchers without tenure who need to publish to avoid perishing do care. If you're starting out and you manage to produce 1 or 2 papers a year, you'll obviously care a lot where your work will be published

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I think you are talking past each other.

The real problem is network effect and collective action.

Whether it's whitelisting, "impact factor", or whatever, lots of tenure committees will have evaluation criteria you have to meet. So in that sense you are very correct.

What misterdoubt was saying, I think, is that nobody in the field actually actually cares that it is Y Journal of X, what they care about is who is publishing in it. Elsevier or whomever isn't what makes it a high impact journal, it's the papers and researchers.

So while what you say is true, it's also true that if everyone in a field could mostly agree to drop Y Journal of X in favor of X letters, or whatever, it would work fine and the tenure committees wouldn't take long to catch up. There might be a year or two of confusion, but that's it.

Right.

To avoid the confusion, I should have emphasized the lack of publisher as marker of high quality. A Sage journal or an Elsevier journal is probably better than random-publisher-I've-barely-heard-of... but I'd never heard of a field where publisher specifically was a criterion for paper/citation-counting.

> What misterdoubt was saying, I think, is that nobody in the field actually actually cares that it is Y Journal of X, what they care about is who is publishing in it.

No, you did not understood the problem. They do care a lot about if it's journal X or journal Y. They care because their job depends on it because the journals that count are regulated into a whitelist and sometimes even into a legal bill, which is outside of their power to change or influence, and they do care because getting your paper into a exclusive paper is a mark of prestige that signals whether your work is worth publishing along with other meaningful work. It's disingenuous and even clueless to assert otherwise. This blind and baseless assertion that journals don't count ignores fundamental and very basic aspects of working in research, particularly how important it is to have your work accepted into the right publication or venue. Otherwise arxiv and blogs would suffice, don't you agree?

FWIW, I understand the problem quite well.

misterdoubt was drawing a distinction between a journal, i.e. the publication itself, and it's constituent papers & researchers. You are simply denying that distinction, which isn't an effective refutation of their idea.

To me it seems you are being intentionally obtuse here, so I'll leave it at that.

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