Behind the curtains of academic publishing: strategic responses of economists and business scholars

October 2021 - June 2023

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Bibliometric measurements are becoming omnipresent and crucially important for academic career decisions. The measured criteria induce strong incentives to align academics’ time and efforts. Based on a survey of economics and business scholars in German-speaking countries, this article empirically explores the interactions between scientific journal metrics and the behavior of authors in the publishing process. The impact different types of pressure have on their decisions is emphasized. In line with rational choice, authors generally move down in journal ranking as they resubmit their papers. While the process is highly influenced by random elements, the Scimago journal rank provides the best fit to researcher’s behavior. Doctoral students initially submit to lower ranked journals compared to higher academic positions, which is likely due to the time pressure they face. The empirical findings improve our understanding of strategic responses in the scientific publishing process. Qualified lotteries, along with other propositions, are suggested to mitigate adverse responses by academics.

While some empirical evidence documents which strategies are used by researchers to exploit bibliometrics, focusing on metrics regarding the publication journal, literature is sparse about strategies of scholars during the entire publication process of a scientific paper. Our survey enables us to study both the journal of initial submission and the publication journal, along with the number of submissions in between. The collection and attempt of quantification for this data is to our knowledge, a novel addition to the literature. The survey shows how academics in different positions submit their papers, which is especially benefitting to young academics not yet well experienced in scientific publishing. The results show that authors are induced to first submit to a well-ranked journal. If they are rejected, they then choose a lower-ranked journal for resubmission. Researchers, therefore, try to maximize the ranking score of their manuscript. (Publication: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-023-04772-9)