Editorial |
Corresponding author: Ingolf Kühn ( ingolf.kuehn@ufz.de ) Academic editor: Uwe Starfinger
© 2017 Ingolf Kühn, Petr Pyšek, Ingo Kowarik.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Kühn I, Pyšek P, Kowarik I (2017) Seven years of NeoBiota – the times, were they a changin’? NeoBiota 36: 57-69. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.36.21926
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During the NEOBIOTA conference 2010 in Copenhagen (see http://www.neobiota.eu/conferences for an overview of all conferences), the attendants decided to transform the serial of the European Group on Biological Invasions Neobiota, edited by Ingo Kowarik and Uwe Starfinger, into an international, open access journal. In the following year, NeoBiota was relaunched under the same name, but with an upper case ‘B’, by Pensoft Publishers. In the editorial of the first issue, a large group of co-editors claimed for openness in covering a broad range of issues in invasion science, including the intersections with applied and social sciences, and referring to different groups of taxa and geographical regions (
First of all, we are pleased with the increasing visibility of NeoBiota – thankworthy to many papers by our esteemed authors that you, our readers, found interesting. Since the relaunch in 2011, we passed through two stages with respect to visibility in major bibliometric databases, namely ISI Web of Science (since 2017 Clarivate Analytics, http://www.webofknowledge.com) and Scopus (https://www.scopus.com/home.uri). We were scrutinised for the first five years by both companies. All papers published since 2015 by NeoBiota are now listed by Web of Science as well as Scopus. But also papers published before 2015 are well visible: up to October 2017, they were cited on average, more than 6 times in Web of Science, the more conservative of the two bibliometric databases recognised in this study.
Indeed, a range of papers seems to have clearly raised timely scientific interest and hence contributed to get successfully listed in both bibliometric databases. For brevity, we just present some prominent examples (cited at least 15 times in Web of Science), starting with the two most cited NeoBiota papers. The first was on the support of major hypotheses in invasion biology by
Bridging the two aforementioned topics is the study of
The work of
Here we analyse whether certain characteristics have changed for papers submitted to NeoBiota before getting listed on Web of Science and Scopus in 2015 and after getting listed. In particular, we will explore whether rejection rates, paper lengths, countries of authors and topics have changed. We considered all papers submitted to NeoBiota from 2011 until September 2017. Although looking hard, we did not find any publication trying this sort of analysis for other papers of new journals with sufficient time before and after being listed in the relevant bibliometric databases.
The number of submissions was rather stable (Fig.
Number of papers submitted to NeoBiota between 2011 and September 2017, differentiated into those submitted before (orange) the journal got listed in Web of Science as well as Scopus, and those after (green).
Number of papers submitted to NeoBiota that were accepted or rejected before and after being listed in Web of Science and Scopus in 2015.
Although a lower number of papers were published so far in the second period, the number of individual authors of published papers increased from 168 to 191; the median number of authors increased only insignificantly (W = 2073, p = 0.3) from 3 to 4 per paper. Yet, there were some remarkable changes in the countries of the institutions the submitting authors were affiliated with (Fig.
Proportional contribution to the total number of papers of countries in which the institutions of the submitting authors are located (multiple affiliations can result in multiple countries per author). Papers submitted to NeoBiota before (orange) and after (green) being listed in Web of Science and Scopus are shown.
Geographical background of authors, illustrated by the number of countries of the institutions the submitting authors are affiliated with (multiple affiliations can result in multiple countries per author) submitted to NeoBiota before and after being listed in Web of Science and Scopus in 2015.
Countries | before 2015 | since 2015 |
---|---|---|
Argentina | 4 | 0 |
Australia | 28 | 29 |
Austria | 3 | 11 |
Belgium | 2 | 2 |
Brazil | 2 | 0 |
Bulgaria | 1 | 0 |
Canada | 27 | 12 |
Chile | 2 | 0 |
China | 22 | 6 |
Croatia | 1 | 0 |
Czech Republic | 25 | 29 |
Denmark | 2 | 0 |
Ecuador | 2 | 1 |
Egypt | 0 | 3 |
Estonia | 3 | 0 |
Finland | 1 | 0 |
France | 8 | 7 |
French Polynesia | 0 | 1 |
Germany | 46 | 14 |
India | 6 | 0 |
Ireland | 1 | 0 |
Israel | 3 | 0 |
Italy | 5 | 8 |
Netherlands | 5 | 1 |
New Caledonia | 0 | 1 |
New Zealand | 8 | 17 |
Norway | 8 | 0 |
Panama | 3 | 0 |
Russia | 0 | 1 |
Seychelles | 2 | 0 |
South Africa | 13 | 38 |
Spain | 17 | 1 |
Sweden | 4 | 0 |
Switzerland | 20 | 5 |
Turkey | 0 | 7 |
UK | 25 | 8 |
USA | 78 | 47 |
Vanuatu | 0 | 1 |
The topics covered by NeoBiota range across a variety of issues (Fig.
Word cloud (www.wortwolken.com) of words used in the title and provided in the keywords of those paper submitted before and after being listed in bibliometric databases in 2015 and of papers subsequently rejected or accepted. Words present in singular and plural were transformed into singular; only words with ≥3 occurrences are displayed, the terms invasion, invasive, alien and species were deleted.
Also quite prominent in both periods were papers on risk assessment. This topic even made it into the so far (December 2017) only “highly cited” paper, i.e. among the top cited papers of their publication cohort: namely
In the second period, ‘management’ and ‘impact’ became frequent topics, with a large overlap, resulting in jointly 18 papers published. Here we focus just on a few with more or less unusual topics or having more general implications.
NeoBiota always claimed to be open minded and aimed at facilitating scientific discussion (
Other NeoBiota highlights published since 2015 that were well perceived, cover several different aspects: Using data from the DAISIE database (www.europe-aliens.org) (
So far, NeoBiota seems to be well perceived by the invasions science community. We have found some differences regarding submissions before and after the listing of NeoBiota by Web of Science and Scopus. It would be interesting to see, how submission rate, rejection rate, involved countries and featured topics would change in the future, not only following recent advances in the scientific literature (
Despite the broad range of issues addressed by the previous contributions of 463 individual authors from 38 countries to NeoBiota, we are still short of papers covering social, legal or economic aspects. We thus strongly encourage further submissions also from these topical areas. Still we are confident that NeoBiota will gain an increasing role in all aspects related to the multi-disciplinary topics of invasion science and its interconnections with other disciplines.
We would cordially like to thank the team of Pensoft Publishers for their constant support, namely Lyubomir Penev (Managing Director) and Pavel Stoev (Editorial Director), further Teodor Georgiev (Technical Director), Plamen Pankov (Layout Manager), and Boriana Ovcharova (Editorial Secretary) providing underlying material to analyse the data presented in the editorial and for logistic help.