Tag: publishing

Academic Publishers Make Resources Available to Cope with COVID-19

The Penn Libraries have assembled a list of academic publishers who are making educational resources more readily available for researchers and teachers who are dealing with teaching or working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Access varies by publisher but includes textbooks and some articles. Annual Reviews, for example, is making all their articles freely available, while other publishers are expanding access to their current subscribers.

Thanks to ZOOARCH-L for publicizing this!

Select Archaeology Books Available for Free Download from Springer

Edit: Or not. Either it was a glitch on Springer’s part, or an extremely short term offer. The books no longer appear to be free. It was nice while it lasted.

Springer has made a big chunk of its catalog of archaeology and other scientific and technical books freely available for download. There are almost 400 archaeology and anthropology books available, including Dent’s Chesapeake Prehistory, Odell’s Lithic Analysis, most/all volumes of the Encyclopedia of Prehistory, and many more. Titles include underwater archaeology, geoarchaeology, historical archaeology, and biological anthropology. See the books at Springer.

Archaeology Journals and Impact Factors

Those in tenure-track positions care a lot about impact factors; other people, not so much.

Elsevier, which coincidentally also publishes academic journals, makes freely available  “three alternative, transparent and accurate views of the true citation impact a journal makes.” These are the Impact per Publication (IPP), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and ScImago Journal Rank (SJR). Each one is updated yearly.

For full information on how these are calculated and see the impact factor for any of thousands of journals, go to journalmetrics.com

Where do the journals devoted to archaeology rank? Generally speaking, well below more general science journals that frequently publish articles of archaeological interest.

The highest ranked journal of any kind, using any of the three rankings, are Nature (IPP 32.997) and Science (25.903), both of which publish occasional articles of archaeological interest.

There is quite a drop off in rank after that, with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) having an IPP of 9.756, followed by Quaternary Science Reviews, Evolutionary Anthropology, and PLoS ONE.

Other journals well-known among archaeologists are the Annual Review of Anthropology, Quaternary Research, and Current Anthropology.

The highest ranked journal dedicated solely to archaeology is the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2.27), followed closely by the Journal of Archaeological Science (2.237), and the Journal of Archaeological Research (2.192).

Trailing somewhat are the Journal of World Prehistory (1.724), Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (1.519), Geoarchaeology (1.51), and a relative newcomer, Archaeological Prospection (1.478). The venerable Antiquity (1.352) is next, followed by Archaeometry, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, the Journal of African Archaeology, and  Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Considering its prominence among North American archaeologists, it may be surprising that American Antiquity just barely rates an IPP above 1.0 (actually 1.038), and is outranked by American Anthropologist, Australian Archaeology, the Journal of Field Archaeology, Archaeology in Oceania, and World Archaeology. The SAA’s sister journal, Latin American Antiquity, garners a 0.642

The SJR rankings seem to be comparable to IPP, although American Antiquity, for one, moves up in the rankings. Using the SNIP shakes things up: After Nature and Science is the Annual Review of Anthropology, outranking PNAS.  Two journals significantly increasing their rank are Medieval Archaeology and the Journal of Roman Archaeology.