Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences

TL;DR

This study analyzes how academic publication preferences vary across fields and individuals, revealing significant heterogeneity, influence of institutional prestige and gender, and limitations of journal impact factors in predicting preferences.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of publication preferences across multiple fields, highlighting the diversity and factors influencing these preferences.

Findings

Fields differ in consensus levels, from strong agreement to fragmentation.

Preferences are influenced by institutional prestige and gender.

Journal Impact Factors only partially explain preferences, undervaluing actual choices.

Abstract

Academic publishing requires solving a collective coordination problem: among thousands of possible publication venues, which deserve a community's attention? A clear consensus helps scholars allocate attention, match submissions to appropriate outlets, and evaluate scholars for hiring and promotion. Yet preferences are not centrally coordinated--they emerge within each field over time. Here we ask whether all fields have arrived at similar solutions to this coordination problem, and whether preferences vary systematically with individual characteristics. Using an adaptive survey of 3,510 US tenure-track faculty yielding 163,002 pairwise comparisons across 8,044 venues, we show that fields occupy a wide spectrum of coordination. Economics, Chemistry, and Physics exhibit strong consensus, with respondents agreeing on elite venues and accurately predicting one another's choices. Computer Science and Engineering show fragmented preferences distributed across hundreds of outlets with minimal overlap. Within fields, preferences correlate with institutional prestige--faculty at elite institutions prefer higher-ranked venues--and with gender, as men prefer higher-ranked venues than women even after accounting for prestige and career stage. Scholars realize their personal preferences more successfully than their respective fields' consensus preferences, indicating that heterogeneity, not just selective hierarchy, shapes publishing outcomes. Journal Impact Factors explain only 64% of preference choices, systematically undervaluing what fields actually prefer. These results quantify how publication preferences vary across the structural diversity of academic fields.