Authoring a PhD

Survey responses
.
Most of the key professional groups in
the major countries survey their members each year on how
they rate their discipline’s journals. These responses often pro-
vide invaluable guidance about which journals are actually
being read by academics and students in the different fields.
Articles in prestigious journals are quite frequently unreadably
dense or too esoteric for most professional readers. Their high
level of citations can be sustained at any one time by a small
group of elite academics citing each other but not necessarily
being read or followed more widely. Sometimes a cohesive ref-
erencing circle of lesser authors can also achieve high (mutual)
citation scores.