Graphs and prestige in agricultural journals

Abstract

In this article, we report on the status of graphs in 21 scientific agricultural journals indexed in Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge. We analyze the authors' use of graphs in this context in relation to the quality of these journals as measured by their 2-year impact factors. We note a substantial variability in the use of graphs in this context: For one journal, 100% of the papers include graphs, whereas for others only about 50% of them include graphs. We also show that higher impact agricultural journals publish more papers with graphs and that there are more graphs in these papers than in those in journals with lower impact factors (r = +0.40).

Solo versus collaborative writing: Discrepancies in the use of tables and graphs in academic articles

“…demonstrate the effects of doing this with graphs and tables from The American Statistician . As an aside, we might note here that Tartanus, Wnuk, Kozak, and Hartley () found that agricultural journals containing a higher number of graphs had higher impact factors than did those with a smaller number. Furthermore, Gelman et al.…”

“…Multi-author papers 30 20 10 0 WE * SCIM *** demonstrate the effects of doing this with graphs and tables from The American Statistician. As an aside, we might note here that Tartanus, Wnuk, Kozak, and Hartley (2013) found that agricultural journals containing a higher number of graphs had higher impact factors than did those with a smaller number. Furthermore, Gelman et al (2002) and Hartley (2012) both argue that increasing the caption lengths to explain more fully what the data actually show can increase the readers' comprehension of both tables and figures.…”

Research on tables and graphs in academic articles: Pitfalls and promises

“…Other formats, such as PDF, may need to be processed by optical recognition software (OCR). Of course, manual counting is also possible (as was done by Tartanus et al., ). Although time‐consuming and tedious, manual counting is most efficient for collecting precise data on tables and graphs (e.g., sizes, forms, variations, kinds of data the items represent, and so on).…”

“…Some examples of recent research in this field can be listed as follows. Tartanus, Wnuk, Kozak, and Hartley () showed that the more graphs there were in agricultural journals, the higher the journals' impact factors. Hartley and Cabanac () showed that men used more graphs than women in scientific articles but not in articles in the social sciences.…”