Academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the dissemination, scrutiny, and discussion of research. Unlike professional magazines or trade magazines, the articles are mostly written by researchers rather than staff writers employed by the journal. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields. Academic journals trace their origins back to the 17th century, with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society being established in 1665 as the first scientific journal.
, it is estimated that over 28,100 active academic journals are in publication, with scopes ranging from the general sciences, as seen in journals like Science and Nature, to highly specialized fields. These journals publish a variety of articles including original research, review articles, and perspectives. The advent of electronic publishing has made academic journals more accessible.
Content
Content usually takes the form of articles presenting original research, review articles, or [|book reviews]. The purpose of an academic journal, according to Henry Oldenburg, is to give researchers a venue to "impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences."The term academic journal applies to scholarly publications in all fields; this includes journals that cover formal sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, which differ somewhat from each other in form and function. Academic journals in the formal and natural sciences are often called scientific journals. Most journals are highly specialized, although some of the oldest journals such as Science and Nature publish articles and scientific papers across a wide range of scientific fields.
Although academic journals are superficially similar to professional magazines, they are quite different. Articles in academic journals are written by active researchers such as students, scientists, and professors. Their intended audience is others in the field, meaning their content is highly technical. Academic articles also deal with research, and are peer reviewed. Meanwhile, trade journals are aimed at people in different fields, focusing on how people in those fields can do their jobs better.
Active academic researchers are expected to publish their work in academic journals, and public funding bodies often require research results to be published in academic journals. Academic credentials for promotion into academic ranks are established in large part by the number and impact of scientific articles published. This places pressure on researchers to publish articles frequently – an environment known as publish or perish.
History
In the 17th century, scientists wrote letters to each other, and included scientific ideas with them. Then, in the mid-17th century, scientists began to hold meetings and share their scientific ideas. Eventually, they led to starting organizations, such as the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences.The idea of a published journal with the purpose of " people know what is happening in the Republic of Letters" was first conceived by François Eudes de Mézeray in 1663. A publication titled Journal littéraire général was supposed to be published to fulfill that goal, but never was. Humanist scholar Denis de Sallo and printer Jean Cusson took Mazerai's idea, and obtained a royal privilege from King Louis XIV on 8 August 1664 to establish the Journal des sçavans. The journal's first issue was published on 5 January 1665. It was aimed at people of letters, and had four main objectives:
- review newly published major European books,
- publish the obituaries of famous people,
- report on discoveries in arts and science, and
- report on the proceedings and censures of both secular and ecclesiastical courts, as well as those of universities both in France and outside.
In 1733, Medical Essays and Observations was established by the Medical Society of Edinburgh as the first fully peer-reviewed journal. Peer review was introduced as an attempt to increase the quality and pertinence of submissions. Other important events in the history of academic journals include the establishment of Nature and Science, the establishment of Postmodern Culture in 1990 as the first online-only journal, the foundation of arXiv in 1991 for the dissemination of preprints to be discussed prior to publication in a journal, and the establishment of PLOS One in 2006 as the first megajournal.
Peer review did not begin until the 1970s, and was seen as a way of enabling researchers who were not as well-known to have their papers published in journals that were more prestigious. Though it was originally done by mailing copies of papers to reviewers, it is now done online.
Scholarly articles
There are two kinds of article or paper submissions in academia: solicited, where an individual has been invited to submit work either through direct contact or through a general submissions call, and unsolicited, where an individual submits a work for potential publication without directly being asked to do so. Upon receipt of a submitted article, editors at the journal determine whether to reject the submission outright or begin the process of peer review. In the latter case, the submission becomes subject to review by outside scholars of the editor's choosing who typically remain anonymous. The number of these peer reviewers varies according to each journal's editorial practice – typically, no fewer than two, though sometimes three or more, experts in the subject matter of the article produce reports upon the content, style, and other factors, which inform the editors' publication decisions.Though these reports are generally confidential, some journals and publishers also practice public peer review. The editors either choose to reject the article, ask for a revision and resubmission, or accept the article for publication. Even accepted articles are often subjected to further editing by journal editorial staff before they appear in print. The peer review can take from several weeks to several months.
Many journal articles are broadly structured according to the IMRAD scheme. Each article has several sections, often including the following:
- The title;
- Information about the author;
- The abstract, which is a one-paragraph summary of the article;
- The introduction, including a background, why the research was done, research on this topic that has been done before, and a hypothesis;
- The methodology or method, which includes the way the research was done, details concerning the study's sample, measures for assessment, and the procedure;
- Findings or results, which summarize what the study found;
- Conclusion, comments, or discussion, which both explain how the results answered the questions that were posed, as well as areas that could be researched in the future;
- A list of works that the article's author cited.
Publishing research results is an essential part of helping science to advance. If scientists are describing experiments or calculations, they should also explain how they did them so that an independent researcher could repeat the experiment or calculation to verify the results, or so that they could evaluate whatever the research article's findings were. Each journal article becomes part of the permanent scientific record.
Types of article
Articles can also be categorized by their purpose. The exact terminology and definitions vary by field and specific journal, but often include:- Letters are short descriptions of important current research findings that are usually fast-tracked for immediate publication because they are considered urgent.
- Research notes are short descriptions of current research findings that are considered less urgent or important than Letters.
- Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are complete descriptions of current original research findings, but there are considerable variations between different fields and journals—80-page articles are not rare in mathematics or theoretical computer science.
- Supplemental articles contain a large volume of tabular data that is the result of current research and may be dozens or hundreds of pages with mostly numerical data. Some journals now only publish this data electronically on the Internet. Supplemental information also contains other voluminous material not appropriate for the main body of the article, like descriptions of routine procedures, derivations of equations, source code, non-essential data, spectra or other such miscellaneous information.
- A target article in a journal is one which argues a case, to which other authors submit a commentary or a response. There may be a final response from the author of the target article. See, for example, Alison Gopnik's article How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 16, Issue 1, which was one of a pair of "target articles" to which other responses were published in the same volume.
- Review articles do not cover original research but rather accumulate the results of many different articles on a particular topic into a coherent narrative about the state of the art in that field. Review articles provide information about the topic and also provide journal references to the original research. Reviews may be entirely narrative, or may provide quantitative summary estimates resulting from the application of meta-analytical methods.
- Data papers are articles dedicated to describe datasets. This type of article is becoming popular and journals exclusively dedicated to them have been established, e.g. Scientific Data and Earth System Science Data.
- Video papers are a recent addition to practice of academic publications. They most often combine an online video demonstration of a new technique or protocol with a rigorous textual description.