Prestige or Perish: Publishing Decisions in Academic Archaeology

Abstract

Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

The Changing Profile of Tenure-Track Faculty in Archaeology

“…Productivity metrics are becoming a popular means of evaluating academic growth. They are commonly used in tenure evaluation and may be considered during the hiring of junior faculty (Beck et al 2021). The availability and use of citation indices (e.g., H-index, i10, etc.)…”

An Intersectional Approach to Equity, Inequity, and Archaeology

“…Although other theoretical approaches have been drawn into archaeological practice, New/Processual Archaeology-archaeology as "science"-still has a grip on the field (Beck et al 2021), especially in CRM. However, a growing number of archaeologists in academia now follow more postpositivist paradigms.…”

Exploring the Nature of Authority Over, and Ownership of Data Generated by Archaeological Lidar Projects in Latin America

“…This lack of clarity on legal frameworks and lidar scanning means that meta-archaeological analyses are particularly important for assessing archaeological lidar data collection, access, and publication. Broadly situated in earlier literature on the socio-politics and philosophy of archaeological practice (Conkey & Spector, 1984 ; Gero, 1985 ; Trigger, 2006 ; Wylie, 2002 ), meta-archaeological analyses have examined, for example, who is awarded major research funding (Goldstein et al, 2018 ), sexual and other forms of harassment within the field (Clancy et al, 2014 ; Meyers et al, 2018 ; Voss, 2021a , 2021b ), who is publishing in archaeology (Bardolph, 2014 ; Heath-Stout, 2020 ; Tushingham et al, 2017 ), and where they are publishing (Beck et al, 2021 ). Within geospatial archaeology, studies have assessed the number of overall publications in terms of geographical origin and topic (Agapiou & Lysandrou, 2015 ; McCoy, 2021 ), and ethical considerations in remote sensing (Cohen et al, 2020 ; Davis & Sanger, 2021 ; Fernandez-Diaz et al, 2018 ; Kersel & Hill, 2019 ).…”