Trends in Microbiology publications: are classic scientific journals condemned to extinction?

Abstract

Scientific journals have played an essential role in the diffusion of research breakthroughs. For many years there was no competition between journals, but, in recent decades they have become categorized by a careful assessment of their published contents based on several metric parameters. Of greater note, the ‘prestige index’ has become an essential tool used by public and private institutions to develop their scientific policy. Thus, the evaluation of research staffs, the concession of grants or fellowships, and even the scholarly reputation and academic positions are mainly founded on a given journal's ‘quality’. As a consequence, the prestige of some journals has gone up, based on the assumption that they publish cutting-edge science, while the reputation of others has gone down. Within the field of Microbiology, we have carried out a direct analysis by monitoring several representative classic journals according to customary metric parameters over twenty years. This analysis also covers another set of journals of recent appearance (novel journals). Although a direct comparison between both groups is not possible, this approach serves to perceive the trends of publication among microbiologists. Our preliminary conclusion is that the continued existence of many so-termed classic journals devoted to Microbiology is seriously threatened.

Top 50 medical journals from Balkan countries: A bibliometric analysis, 2000–2020

“…Apart from Mikrobiyoloji Bulteni, no other journal from the Balkan countries is indexed in SCIE, which makes the journal particularly important to the Balkan region. Macias et al 19 showed that continued existence of many so-called classic journals devoted to microbiology is threatened because new microbiology journals are more popular. Although the only microbiology journal in the Balkan region, the journal is published only in Turkish, which may explain why the JIF of Mikrobiyoloji Bulteni keeps fluctuating over the years despite it being the sole representative of microbiology.…”