Quantifying Publisher’s Competence Through Scholarly Engagement

Considerable efforts and resources are invested by scholarly publishers to advance and promote their journals. These efforts take the form of strategic planning and employed content and publisher editors who provide preprint and post-print assistance to editorial boards, to enhance discoverability and viewership of their journals. However, the effects of these investments are not evaluated, as most assess journals as standalone entities often based on citation metrics. This work aims to quantify the competence of scholarly publishers using a novel metric. The proposed metric, coined as scholarly engagement, is based on a citation-to-view ratio (CVR) garnered by the journals’ articles. The selection of journals takes into consideration broad spectra of journal position across different categories, ranks and timeline. The evaluation uses more than 298,000 articles published in the past ten years. Our quantitative study demonstrates robustness of the proposed metric and its ability to distinguish scholarly publishers.