Publication lag and early view effects in information science journals

A major problem in today’s scholarly publishing process is the long tails for the assignment of volume and issue numbers for approved articles. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which information science journals offer early view features and the effects of these features.

The study addresses three basic questions: Do the articles approved for publication in information science journals appear in the online platforms of these journals before the assignment of volume and issue numbers? How long do the articles wait in the online platforms before they get the volume and issue numbers? Is there a statistically significant relationship between the online accessing numbers of the articles before they are published and bibliometric indicators?

More than half of the information science journals complete the editorial process in reasonable durations and share new articles with their readers before publishing them. In some journals, there are articles that wait for more than a year to be assigned volume and issue numbers after the completion of the editorial process. There are statistically significant differences, in terms of both their impact factor and immediacy index values, between the journals that offer early view features and those that do not. Both the impact factor and the immediacy index values of the journals that provide early view are higher than the others.

Adopting the early view policy may significantly help increase the impact factor and immediacy index values of the journals, as well as the visibility of their contents

The answers to this study’s research questions offer a new perspective to overcome the challenges in the processes through which scientific products meet with their users.