Authoring a PhD

Circulation and journal type
.
The chances of anyone else
noticing your work partly depend upon how many people even
get to eyeball the journal where it has appeared. Large-circulation
journals are often those which are longest-lived in a particular
discipline. Having reached good world-wide library access long
ago (around 2000 to 3000 copies or above), they can to some
extent rely on inertial ordering and librarians’ concern for 
continuity to shield them from current market forces. Often
these are ‘omnibus’ journals with rather a broad mission to
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cover a whole discipline, especially those run by prestigious
professional associations.
By contrast, most recent start-up journals (in the last thirty
years) have been specialist journals with much more focused
markets and editorial statements of intent. The actual paying
circulation of many new or specialized journals, even those
which have been running for a decade, may be counted in the
tens or at best low hundreds. Commercial publishers have kept
on starting new specialist journals, even since the late 1990s
when the academic market has been shrinking. Some of the cir-
culations for these titles are so low that there is a real risk to the
academics who submit papers – initially that very few people
will ever get sight of the journal. In the longer term there may
be some degree of risk that a small, newish journal may fold
and its materials become even less accessible.