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  Re: [Aroid-l] Increasing our impact
From: "D. Christopher Rogers" <branchiopod at gmail.com> on 2012.04.06 at 15:54:22(22673)
Good morning!

One of the best ways is to have a publisher that advertises your journal. I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Crustacean Biology (link below in my tag lines) and we recently switched from Allen Press to Brill, with 2012 being our first year with Brill. Because of Brill's advertising, submissions to the journal have increased exponentially. For 31 years, we have had four issues per year. This year we have sufficient submissions we are going to six issues per year. We are still rejecting plenty of manuscripts as well. I have reason to believe that Brill is not the best place for the IAS, but there may be other options, particularly if Allen wants to market Aroidenana better.

When you mention JSTOR and number of times Aroideana papers are cited by other papers, you are talking about ISI and similar impact factors. To do that, we would have to increase the number of scientific manuscripts submitted and published and decrease the number of popular articles. However, there is a significant portion of the Aroideana audience that is interested in the popular articles and not so much in the scientific. One option would be to spilt the two submission types up; maybe have only science in Aroideana, and horticulture in the Newsletter. Then you would need to work to attract more scientists to submit in Aroideana to increase its potential value to JSTOR or ISI.

It is really important to remember that the membership of IAS is composed of fairly equal parts of those who want science, those who want popular articles, and those who want both. IAS cannot afford to (and I am positive does not want to) alienate any aspect of its membership. Aroideana will probably never have a high ISI impact factor, simply because it is so very focused on the Araceae. Any botanical journal that encompasses more more families or aspects of horticulture will have a higher impact factor, simply because the pool of authors is not as limited.

I for one, really enjoy Aroideana, and I strongly suggest that you renew your membership. For 34 volumes, Aroideana has been a wonderful resource that has improved substantially over the years, especially under Derek Burch and Tom Croat's editorship.

Happy days,

Christopher

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