Associate Editor Manolis Antonoyiannakis discusses the highlighting, as Editors' Suggestions, of a small percentage of the papers published each week. We highlight papers primarily for their importance and impact in their respective fields, or because we find them particularly interesting or elegant. It turns out that the additional layer of scrutiny involved in the selection of papers as Editors' Suggestions is associated with a significantly elevated and sustained citation impact.
In this environment, scientific publishers face new challenges. To stay relevant and competitive amidst the deluge of information, publishers need to maintain a broad scope by expanding their portfolios to new and emerging fields, publish sufficient numbers of papers to capture market share, attract some of the key developments in each field, provide tools to assist readers in navigating efficiently to papers of interest and relevance, and reward authors of excellent papers by providing the appropriate visibility and publicity. While juggling such challenges, publishers need to remain mindful of their overarching responsibility, namely to maintain high publication standards through rigorous peer review. Some publishers have responded to the new challenges by simply allowing their journals to grow. Others have launched new titles, from large-sized and interdisciplinary journals, to highly exclusive titles, to numerous niche journals of low or moderate impact catering to narrow subfields. For example, from 1999 to 2014, the number of physics journals [3] has increased from 253 to 389. (The APS, in particular, has launched four new journals in this period.) Many publishers have also started providing select sets of papers (highlights) that are deemed to be of higher quality than the average paper in their source journals to accord them higher visibility (with the associated online search features). Sometimes, highlighted papers are accompanied by editors' summaries or experts' commentaries that elucidate their importance. It is indicative of the evolving landscape of scientific publishing that this practice of highlighting has proliferated especially in the last 15 years, and most of the major physics publishers have adopted it by now.
Starting in 2008 (a year after PRL initiated the idea) [4], PRB editors have been highlighting a few papers each week, which they mark as Editors’ Suggestions. These papers, when published, feature prominently on our website, with an image and short introduction written by the editors, and are marked with a special icon in the Tables of Contents and in online searches. Papers are selected primarily on the basis of their importance and impact in their respective fields, or because they are deemed interesting or elegant, and are assessed by the editors, who utilize the referees’ reports and their own understanding. More often than not, the highlighted papers receive strong endorsement from our referees in the review process. We typically highlight 5 papers out of 90 each week.
How do Editors’ Suggestions fare in terms of citation impact? The standard disclaimers are warranted here. First, the ’true’ impact of a paper goes beyond citation impact. Second, we do not highlight papers with the sole criterion of citability in mind-and even if we did, citations to specific papers are hard to predict anyway, as experience has shown. Third, it is difficult to assess the citation impact of an individual paper before the lapse of a considerable amount of time. Fourth, judging importance and impact always contains a subjective element. Fifth, citation practices depend on the “hotness” of a field or the size of a scientific community; some papers take a long time to garner citations, etc. While there is value to all these concerns, we are not the only ones to have witnessed [5] that sufficiently large groups of papers that perform well, in terms of citations, in the first couple of years, tend to attract considerable interest in their respective communities in the longer run.
Figure 1 shows that on average Editors’ Suggestions receive significantly more citations than the other PRB articles. For example, of the papers published in 2012-2013, Suggestions received on average 5.9 citations in 2014, compared with 4.8 citations for Rapid Communications, and 3.7 citations for PRB as a whole. (The latter number is the PRB Impact Factor.) This stratification of citation impact (PRB Editors’ Suggestions > PRB Rapid Communications > PRB journal) is consistent throughout all years. (In the figure, we include the year 2009 for completeness, even though its sample size is much smaller than for the following years, which makes its average citation metric more sensitive to a few highly cited papers. However, the median citation metric for 2009 is no different than for the following years, as we explain below.) FIG. 1 (color online). Mean (solid lines) and median (dashed lines) citation metrics for PRB Editors’ Suggestions (blue), PRB Rapid Communications (red), and the whole PRB journal (green). Citations are counted during the citation year shown on the horizontal axis, for papers published the previous two years. The mean citation metric for the whole journal is PRB’s Impact Factor. The data labels on the blue line show the numbers of Suggestions published the two years prior to the citation year. Citation data from Web of Science. The measures of spread for Editors’ Suggestions are as follows. Mean: Th
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