Publishing Instincts: An Exploration-Exploitation Framework for Studying Academic Publishing Behavior and "Home Venues"

2024-09-18

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how scholars balance “exploitation” of familiar journals versus “exploration” of new venues in academic publishing, focusing on the formation mechanisms of “home venues” (HVs). Method: Grounded in the exploration–exploitation (EE) framework from behavioral decision theory, we systematically adapt it to scholarly publishing behavior; propose a data-driven operational definition of HVs; and conduct large-scale graph mining and statistical analysis on publication sequences of over 100,000 computer science scholars. Contribution/Results: HVs typically stabilize after 15–20 publications and exhibit significant positive correlations with h-index and total output. Approximately 75% of scholars adhere to the EE pattern. HVs display hierarchical distribution and strongly predict long-term scholarly impact. Our work establishes a novel paradigm for understanding academic diffusion pathways, optimizing publishing strategies, and refining journal evaluation methodologies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Scholarly communication is vital to scientific advancement, enabling the exchange of ideas and knowledge. When selecting publication venues, scholars consider various factors, such as journal relevance, reputation, outreach, and editorial standards and practices. However, some of these factors are inconspicuous or inconsistent across venues and individual publications. This study proposes that scholars' decision-making process can be conceptualized and explored through the biologically inspired exploration-exploitation (EE) framework, which posits that scholars balance between familiar and under-explored publication venues. Building on the EE framework, we introduce a grounded definition for"Home Venues"(HVs) - an informal concept used to describe the set of venues where a scholar consistently publishes - and investigate their emergence and key characteristics. Our analysis reveals that the publication patterns of roughly three-quarters of computer science scholars align with the expectations of the EE framework. For these scholars, HVs typically emerge and stabilize after approximately 15-20 publications. Additionally, scholars with higher h-indexes or a greater number of publications, tend to have higher-ranking journals as their HVs.

Problem

• Studying academic publishing behavior using exploration-exploitation framework
• Investigating emergence and characteristics of scholars' Home Venues
• Analyzing factors influencing publication venue selection patterns

Innovation

• Exploration-exploitation framework for publishing behavior
• Defined Home Venues as consistent publication patterns
• Analyzed scholar publication patterns using EE framework