LAUSR

Academics produce and consume information. Refereed journal articles categorize information by topic, screen it for reliability, and sort it into a reputational hierarchy, which aims to differentiate information of greater or lesser value. Journal rankings are set mainly by citations, measured as impact factors (IF) or H indices (Callaway, 2016). Many academic reviews include only high-ranked journals. Rankings have powerful effects on university funding and individual careers (Buckley, 2019). Academics submit articles preferentially to higher-ranked journals, despite extra effort in reformats, revisions, resubmissions and rejections, because higher-ranked publications yield higher rewards. Higher-ranked journals can charge higher subscriptions and publication fees. Journal editors preferentially accept articles that they assess as more original (Sanchez, Makkonen, & Williams, 2019), but they cannot describe this judgement objectively (Sanchez et al., 2019).