Impact of Human Behavioral Papers at Journal of Neuroscience

AbstractA recent policy change at Journal of Neuroscience (JN) has significantly increased editorial “desk rejections”, reducing the number of papers that are considered for publication. Survey results from 130 scientists suggested that the new policy may have had a particularly large impact on studies that focused on human behavioral techniques. To quantify the effects of the new policy, we gathered data on all papers ever published in JN (~35,000), as well as all papers that had cited the JN papers (~2.7 million papers). We found that the recent change in editorial policy had disproportionately affected rejection rates of human behavioral papers: since 2015, the number of human behavioral papers as a proportion of all papers published in JN has seen a 30% decline. While there has been a long-term declining trend in the journal’s impact factor, we found that this declining impact factor was shared by both human behavioral papers as well as other papers in the journal. This suggested that whatever may have been the source of the declining impact factor at JN, this source was affecting the various areas of research equally. That is, it was unlikely that papers in any one field were responsible for the declining impact factor number at JN. Indeed, when impact was measured over the long-term, we found that the average human behavioral paper at JN consistently outperformed other papers, generating a significantly higher number of citations per year at 5 and 10 years post publication.