Desperate marketing from Journal of Neuroscience

Yesterday Chris Chambers was outraged to receive marketing spam from Journal of Neuroscience, boasting that articles published in their journal received many more citations than those published in their competitors.

There are many reasons for taking a dim view of using citation counts as a measure of journal prestige. Citations are very dependent on the field of study, and their distribution is highly skewed. It could be argued that Journal of Neuroscience was avoiding these problems: it compared itself with other journals that covered similar subject areas, and it presented total counts, rather than means.

Except……   It did not make any adjustment for the fact that Journal of Neuroscience publishes many more papers than the other journals it compares itself to. I looked at Scopus statistics for articles and reviews published in four journals for the period 2010 to 2013. Journal of Neuroscience published 7004 papers, Neuroimage published 4258, Neuron published 1348 and Nature Neuroscience published 962. So saying that Journal of Neuroscience had more citations is a bit like claiming that India is a wealthier country than Luxembourg.

I started to wonder how Journal of Neuroscience compared with these other journals when number of papers was taken into account. The answer is shown below:

So the question we are left with is whether those promoting the Journal of Neuroscience are being devious, and think their readers are too stupid to notice this very basic error, or whether they themselves are too stupid to notice it.