Publish and Perish?

The publishing of research has implications for the evaluation of research careers, research departments, and funding for research projects. Researchers' academic evaluation relies heavily on the status of the journals in which they publish. The inclusion of one's work in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) is often used as an indicator of academic quality. This is unfortunate for many environmental researchers, as their journals are not represented in the SCI and SSCI. Two investigations were carried out to determine the reasons for this. The first investigation identified 352 existing environmental academic journals, classified into seven categories (and several subcategories). Of these, two categories were not represented in the SCI or SSCI: environmental systems analysis journals and corporate environmental management journals. The second survey investigated the publishing patterns of interdisciplinary research groups and the characteristics of the journals in which they publish. In spite of acceptable citation levels, interdisciplinary environmental journals are excluded from the SCI and SSCI. A major reason seems to be that citations of their articles are uncounted by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the organization producing the SCI and SSCI, because citations mostly take place in a group of journals completely unrepresented in ISI's database.     

Thirty years of plant transformation technology development

Technology development is seminal to many aspects of basic and applied plant transgenic science. Through the development and commercialization of genetically modified crops, the evolution of plant transgenic technologies is also relevant to society as a whole. In this study, literature statistics were used to uncover trends in the development of these technologies. Publication volume and impact (citation) over the past 30 years were analysed with respect to economic zones, countries, species and DNA delivery method. This revealed that, following a dramatic expansion in the 1980s, publications focusing on the development of transgenic technology have been slowing down worldwide since the early mid-1990s, except in a few leading Asian countries. The implications of these trends on the future of plant transgenic science as a whole are discussed.