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In other words, what is the true impact of evolutionary papers in non-evolutionary journals?
Evolutionary papers are published in a wide range of journals, most of which are not classified under Evolutionary biology.
However, a journal's overall impact factor may well be a poor predictor for the impact of its evolutionary papers.
I show that there are large differences in impact among evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers within journals; while the impact of evolutionary papers published in multidisciplinary journals is substantially overestimated by their overall impact factor, the impact of evolutionary papers in many of the more specialized, non-evolutionary journals is significantly underestimated.
In other words, the overall impact of a journal does not necessarily provide a good predictor of the impact of the evolutionary papers it publishes.
Not surprisingly, there are highly significant differences among journals in the impact of the evolutionary papers they publish, as well as in their overall impact (Figure 1A).
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Here I showed that, within these non-evolutionary journals, there are systematic differences in impact among evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers, and to some extent even among different subjects within evolutionary biology.
While in theory this can be circumvented by limiting comparisons to journals within the same field, for a diverse and multidisciplinary field like evolutionary biology, in which the majority of papers are published in journals that publish both evolutionary and non-evolutionary papers, this is impossible.
It is important that scientists are able to publish potentially important observations, particularly those that are unrelated to their current projects that have no sufficient grounds to be framed into a classical eco-evolutionary paper, and could feasibly impact on the history of the systems in which they occurred.
It's common for mainstream press articles to sex up their science reporting, but implying that "science has verified" something based on an evolutionary psychology paper is as accurate as claiming that scientists have verified the deliciousness of Marmite.
Evolutionary Ecology seeks papers with a clear novelty.
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com