Success factors of academic journals in the digital age
- PDF / 1,139,108 Bytes
- 29 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 6 Downloads / 200 Views
Success factors of academic journals in the digital age Milan Frederik Klus1
•
Alexander Dilger1
Received: 14 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Since the early 1990s, when digitalisation began to open new opportunities for disseminating information, many academic journals started to introduce online services. However, while some studies suggest that online availability and free access to journal articles are positively connected to the number of citations an article receives, little is known about whether being an early adopter of digital services provides journals with a (long-term) competitive advantage in times of digital change. We use data from SSCI-listed management journals to examine which journals pioneered the introduction of digital services, to what extent firstmover advantages can be identified, and which journal characteristics are associated with citation-based performance indicators. Our results show that lower ranked journals were the first to introduce digital services and were beneficiaries of the digital age. Furthermore, we find a negative correlation between general submission fees and journal performance and that the top-performing journals of our sample are those of non-commercial publishers. Our analysis of the relationship between journal performance and the provision of open access contradicts previous studies, as we find no positive correlations between performance and open access on the journal level. Keywords Academic journals Digitalisation Online availability Open access Success indicators JEL Classification I23 L82 L86 M21 O33 & Alexander Dilger [email protected] Milan Frederik Klus [email protected] 1
Institute for Organisational Economics, University of Mu¨nster, Scharnhorststr. 100,, 48151 Mu¨nster, Germany
123
Business Research
1 Introduction Since the 1990s and early 2000s, more and more academic journals have offered selected content or entire issues online. With the help of modern technologies, this content can be accessed by a large number of people from any location (Lozano et al. 2012), making digitalisation a relevant aspect in the context of knowledge generation (Ding et al. 2010). Digitalisation also changes the behaviour of those who consume this content (readers), as they can search for specific topics or articles without having to search through entire journal issues (Lozano et al. 2012). As a result, readers obtain information from a variety of sources, including print journals, electronic journals, full-text databases, and e-print servers (Boyce et al. 2004), which increases the availability but also the complexity of the search process due to the multitude of possibilities (Turner 2005). Academic journals, the main focus of our study, are still the premier format for disseminating academic articles. However, how successful a journal is in terms of its influence on the academic field largely depends on the quality of its contributions, which makes it crucial for journals to attrac
Data Loading...
