Abstract
Editors exert a significant influence on a journal’s mission and in governing the strategic direction of entire fields. They act as gatekeepers not only by ensuring the quality of contributions but also the integrity of the scholarly process. For being such an important element in the sectoral system of scientific production and communication, the editorial phenomenon constitutes an apt but still underexplored research focus. This paper identifies a core group of Innovation Studies journals from the 20-journals list found by Fagerberg et al. (Res Policy 41:1132–1153, 2012) and focuses on seven innovation-oriented top-tier journals to better understand the structure and relationships among the editors. The sample comprises 419 editors occupying 467 editorial positions and assuming 38 different duties. An interlocking editorship pattern is uncovered as 11% of the editors serve on multiple boards. We deploy social network analysis to further map and understand the editorial infrastructure of Innovation Studies thus offering new insights on how the field is organised. Industrial and Corporate Change, Research Policy, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Technovation have the highest centrality in terms of number of direct connections to other boards (degree), the shortest distance from all network journals (closeness) and bridges to the largest number of other pairs of journals (betweenness) although Industrial and Corporate Change is noticed as the primus inter pares in the sample.
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Notes
Gender was ascribed based on their given names by using GenderChecker.com.
Those editors identified as “Editors-in-chief” are found not to be assigned to that same role in any other journal from this sample, thus in aligned with the deontology of editors as prescribed by George and Woodward, (1994) and Rousseau et al., (2018), who states that no lead editor should hold such a position in more than one journal.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to Vitor Corado Simões, Bram Timmermans and Jon Mikel Zabala-Iturriagagoitia for their detailed comments and suggestions to the work leading us here. Preliminary ideas and results benefited from being presented in the 18th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI2021), July 2021 (Santos & Mendonça, 2021b); we thank the participants and organisers. Sandro Mendonça gratefully acknowledges the support by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), Portugal, and the support provided by Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL) and Research Unit on Complexity and Economics (UECE-REM). The work also benefited from grants UID/GES/00315/2013, UIDB/00315/2020; UIDB/05069/2020; PTDC/EGE-ECO/30690/2017 and is part of the project PTDC/EGE-ECO/30690/2017. All the views and shortcomings remain the responsibility of the authors alone.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by both authors. The first draft of the was written and reviewed by both editors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Santos, A.T., Mendonça, S. The small world of innovation studies: an “editormetrics” perspective. Scientometrics 127, 7471–7486 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04279-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04279-9