Journals without editors: What is going on?

Last October, I was surprised to see a tweet from @autismcrisis (Michelle Dawson) saying "Belatedly noticed: @deevybee is on the editorial board of Johnny Matson's RASD?! Well I'm speechless. Wow."

Many of those reading this tweet were puzzled as to what this was all about, but I was aware that Michelle had earlier drawn attention to an odd feature of the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD): an unusually high proportion of the papers in the journal were authored by the Editor, Johnny Matson*.

People were even more puzzled by my reaction, which was to express surprise and to thank Michelle for telling me. Surely, you might think, you'd know if you were on the Editorial Board of a journal. But, actually, that's not always the case. I had no recollection of having joined the Editorial Board, but my memory for the past is not good. I did remember having some correspondence with Johnny Matson around 2008, about a nice article he'd written concerning problems with some of the 'gold standard' diagnostic instruments (see this blogpost for more on this). I suspected that I'd agreed to serve on the Editorial Board in the course of this email exchange, but I had no details of this on file. Journals vary considerably in how far they treat their Editorial Board as emblematic, and how far they actually make use of the board in decision-making. I had barely had any interaction with Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders over the years, and had remained sufficiently unaware of my Editorial Board role to omit this from my curriculum vitae. But there I was, as Michelle had noted, listed as a member of the Editorial Board on the journal website.

I realised that I had to take action for two reasons. First, RASD was an Elsevier journal. I had been convinced by the arguments of Tim Gowers to sign the Cost of Knowledge statement, pledging not to support Elsevier, in the light of their exorbitant pricing of journals. In 2012 I had resigned from the editorial boards of other Elsevier journals. But I'd been unaware that I was on the Editorial Board of RASD, so I had not written to them. Second, I was interested in Michelle's concerns about editorial practices at the journal. I thought I had better check her claims out for myself. What I found was disturbing.  Matson had been editor of Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD) since the journal's inception in 1987, and he then took up editorship of the sister journal, Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders when it started in 2007. As can be seen in Figure 1, his publication rate shot up around 2007, and an analysis using Web of Science reveals that many of these papers were published in RASD or RIDD. Indeed, Matson is an author on over ten percent of the papers published in RASD since 2007.

Figure 1: Publications identified from Web of Science**

Around 2007, Matson's papers also started being highly cited as can be seen in Figure 2. 

Figure 2: Matson citations from Web of Science**

On Web of Science he currently has an H-index of 59: those of you who know about these things will recognise this as an impressive value that would usually be indicative of a scientist who does highly influential work. His University webpage proudly displays the 'Highly Cited' badge from Thompson Reuters. However, there is something unusual about Matson's citation profile: just over half of the citations are self-citations. I did some comparisons with other top scientists in the field of autism/intellectual disabilities, and it is clear that Matson is an outlier in terms of his rate of self-citation (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Comparison of self-citation rate for autism/ID researchers***

I wrote to Matson to query my editorial board status and to explain why I wished to resign and received a curt reply, confirming that I had agreed to be on the Editorial Board, but he would remove me. Nevertheless, my name remained on the Editorial Board list of the journal website for a while. But then, a few weeks ago, there was a new development. For both RIDD and RASD, the pages on the journal website showing information about the Editors and Editorial Board disappeared. What, I wonder, is going on?

* (update 22 Mar 2015): Michelle's tweets on this topic can be accessed from the sidebar on her blogpost
**Search terms were AUTHOR: (matson j*) AND TOPIC: (autism OR intellectual)

***Here I simply selected well-known researchers whose names were distinctive enough to make a search unchallenging. Where necessary to disambiguate authors I added the same Topic search term as for Matson  

Update 5th February 2015
In the past few days there have been some new developments. 
On 2nd Feb, Alicia Wise (@wisealic) of Elsevier responded to a concerned tweet from @DavidPriceUCL to say
 Hi, David - colleagues have been speaking to community about new Editors-in-Chief; appointments will be announced shortly. 

Then on 4th Feb, Michelle Dawson (@autismcrisis) tweeted:RASD finally has (cryptic) editorial board info for March 2015 issue http://j.mp/1BZQC1D  compare to Feb 2015 issue http://j.mp/1zQNY0D   
You have to download the pdfs to see the information. The Feb issue list Matson as editor and gives the full editorial board. The March issue deletes the editorial board but retains Matson as editor. We might, from Alicia Wise's tweet, have expected the opposite.

I have, of course,  no idea if these changes relate to anything in this blogpost. 

Update 7th February 2015
Michelle Dawson pointed out on Twitter that back in June 2013 she suggested that someone should look at how far the impact factor of RASD and RIDD is affected by Matson's self-citations. I doubt there'd be much effect on RIDD, where Matson's papers constitute only around 1% of articles, but I did the sums for RASD. Readers who have access to Web of Science can see the historical impact factor data here. I simply recomputed the data after searching for papers in a 2-year period with the search term NOT Matson J* as author. I had to read the N citation data from the bar plot you get from citation reports in Web of Science, so precision not guaranteed, but here's what it looks like:

P.S. I am hearing on the grapevine that people have had papers accepted in RASD and RIDD without reviewing, but nobody seems willing to say that publicly. If there are any brave souls out there who are prepared to speak out, please can you do so via Comments. Thanks. 

Update 14th February 2015

In the comments below, Michael Osuch, Publishing Director for Neuroscience & Psychology journals at Elsevier, has added some notes of clarification. He states: "Under Dr Matson’s editorship of both RIDD and RASD all accepted papers were reviewed, and papers on which Dr Matson was an author were handled by one of the former Associate Editors. Dr Matson and his team of Associate Editors stepped down at the end of 2014."
The issue of Matson's papers being handled by an Associate Editor is key. When discussing this point, some people have argued that editors should never publish in their own journal. I disagree, and think it is reasonable provided (a) it is a relatively rare occurrence and (b) the paper is handled by an Associate Editor (AE) who ensures that the paper is subjected to a rigorous review. In such cases it is crucial that the AE is someone who will not be unduly influenced by their relationship with the editor.

In this regard it is worrying to see that two people who were, until 2015, the first listed AEs on both RASD and RIDD are relatively junior with close links to Matson. Thompson Davis III is an associate professor in Matson's department with expertise in autism and anxiety disorders. To identify his publications on Web of Science I searched for AUTHOR: (Davis T*) AND TOPIC: (autism OR anxiety) AND ADDRESS: (Louisiana State University). This brought up 41 publications. Only a few of these are published in RASD or RIDD (five papers from 2007 to 2011), but he has eleven co-authored papers with Matson. Jill Fodstad's CV indicates she took the Clinical Psychology program at Louisiana State University, where it seems that Matson encouraged students to co-author papers with him. (This is evident from an analysis of his coauthors in RASD/RIDD). She is now based at Indiana State University.  55 of her 59 publications are co-authored with Matson, and 30 of them are published in RASD or RIDD. 

Good editorial practice would dictate that neither of these AEs should be assigned papers authored by Matson because the unequal power relationship with him would make it extremely difficult to give a dispassionate appraisal of the work.

Of course, I do not know which AEs did handle Matson's papers, but I would be surprised if an experienced senior editor would have accepted his manuscripts without challenging the high rate of self-citation.

Update 15th February 2015
An email from a colleague reads as follows re another Associate Editor at RASD, Jeff Sigafoos:
"I have heard of several colleagues having papers accepted extremely quickly at Developmental Neurorehabilitation.  The editor at that time was Jeff Sigafoos, but I think he has since stepped down from that position.
Anyway, I looked up Jeff Sigafoos website...look at his publication list: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/education/about/staff/publications-jeff-sigafoos
...an amazing number of papers in RIDD and RASD.  "

I also checked the submission/acceptance lag for Sigafoos' papers in RIDD. For the first 20 I found, 7 were accepted within one day and a total of 14 within one week. This does rather question the claim by Michael Osuch that Matson acted as sole referee 'in a minority of cases'.
I should add that Developmental Neurorehabilitation is not an Elsevier journal: it is published by Informa Healthcare.
Finally, you might ask whether anyone is hurt by this. I think the answer is that it is damaging to other people who published in any of these journals in good faith, and who now will have the validity of their work questioned because of inadequate peer review.