Waterbirds: Birds of a feather flock together

2020

Best student article published in Ostrich in 2019: hold onto your saddle, Bill, for the story behind a close race iii As I started to pen this editorial, with some Associate Editor votes still outstanding to decide the best student article to appear in a printed edition of Ostrich during 2019 (Volume 90), I did not know who would be the ultimate winner. A little bit like the Democratic primaries in the United States currently underway (Bernie or Biden or someone else?), there were many candidate articles (15), each with various merits, and appealing to different audiences. Of the first three Associate Editor and Advisory Board votes received, only one article shared more than one vote, and several editors noted that it had been a lot harder to decide than they had expected. On 25 January 2019, with seven votes in, there was only a two-point difference between the leading article and the next two articles tied for second place. Because each editor is allowed to choose three articles and then rank these (score three points for the top article, then two and then one), at that stage just one more vote could swing things either way. As the votes came in, it was clear that the editors would not be deciding the best article for the 2019 competition on their own, a stark contrast to the clear winner from last year's competition (Braimoh et al. 2018; Lee 2019). Kate Carsten's paper on dispersal of juvenile Southern Ground Hornbill Bucorvus leadbeateri (Carstens et al. 2019) ultimately received the highest editors score by one point. The other component to the final score is the 'cumulative impact score', which is the sum of Views, Citations and Altmetric scores, corrected by dividing by the number of months since the online publication. The Editor's score and the impact score contribute roughly even weight to the final score (median for both across articles was approximately two). Citations generally contributed very little to the impact score: the top cited article (three citations) had also been online the longest (Freeman et al. 2019), with most other articles either not cited or cited only once and mostly in an Editorial by Chevonne Reynolds (Reynolds 2019) introducing the Ostrich special issue on Waterbirds. Compared to Views, Altmetric Score contributes also relatively little to the 'cumulative impact score', with a median of four. The highest Altmetric Score (15) had been achieved by a paper examining the impact of a concentrated solar power trough facility on wildlife (Jeal et al. 2019). Hence, the biggest contributor to the 'cumulative impact score' is number of Views, as per the article details page on the Taylor and Francis website. Admittedly, this metric is probably of more interest to the publishers than authors, but Views can be considered a measure of academic reader interest (and hence important in terms of future likely citations, rather than Altmetric, which can be heavily weighted by popular appeal). Interestingly, for this set of articles there was no notable correlation between Views and the Altmetri...

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Best student article published in Ostrich in 2019: hold onto your saddle, Bill, for the story behind a close race

2020

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A celebration of 90 years of Ostrich: a review of past, present, and future directions

2020

View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles EDITORIAL A celebration of 90 years of Ostrich: a review of past, present, and future directions iii The year 2020 is the 90th anniversary of Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology. This is an estimable age for a journal, but as a consequence the origins and evolution of the journal are somewhat shrouded in time for younger ornithologists, or not known at all to those focusing their ornithological interests in Africa but based elsewhere. The journal recently achieved its highest 5-year impact factor ever in 2019, after achieving its highest ever 2-year impact factor for 2016. Altogether, it is thus fitting to undertake some research to answer fundamental questions of the journal's history to inform the modern reader on the origins and changes that the journal has experienced over the course of its history. In relation to other histories of African ornithology, this article focuses specifically on the journal, rather than the societies to which it has been affiliated. The journal has over 3000 articles that are digitally indexed since its inception in 1930. We use this database to explore some trends and themes of the evolution of Ostrich over its sometimes-turbulent history, placing it in the context of modern ornithology, contributors, publishing, and where it should be headed into the future. Introduction Ostrich, the scientific journal of BirdLife South Africa, has for a long time advertised itself as the leading journal of African Ornithology. But where did it come from and how did it get there? In this review, I explore the Ostrich archives to compare where the journal is now in relation to what was published in the past. The purpose of this article is not a history of ornithology, or even South African ornithology (for that please read Roy Siegfried's (2016) Levaillant's Legacy or Richard Dean's (2017) Warriors, Dilettantes and Businessmen), or the history of the South African Ornithological Society (SAOS, now BirdLife South Africa), although Ostrich history is intertwined with the SAOS for the first few decades of its existence. For that history, Ashton's (1980) article on the topic is still the most relevant, focusing on the society, prominent members, presidents, and past editors of Ostrich. Since most preeminent ornithologists of this century favour international journals for publishing their research, we also cannot pretend that this review represents the status of research in Africa (that is best read in Beale's (2018a) Trends and themes in African ornithology). Instead, this article is more aligned to 'Sixty years of Ostrich' (Craig 1988), in terms of a reflection of where Ostrich is now in the context of research in Africa and the context in which Ostrich finds itself: rated as one of the world's top 20 ornithological journals, but competing unevenly with international journals due to a narrower niche and impact factor trap, which I will explain later in this article. Thirty years ago, a central consideration for an a...

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One big Impact Factor

2021