US Scientists Dominate as Journal Gatekeepers

The editors in chief, deputy editors, managing editors, and editorial advisory boards who control scientific publication – collectively known as gatekeepers¹ – exert a special influence on the orchestration of international research activity. The selection of journal gatekeepers is a self-organizing process that science has developed over the last three centuries. An invitation to serve as a gatekeeper is both a distinction and reward. But the process has skewed gatekeeper demographics, as we found when we built and evaluated a database of international core journal gatekeepers in 2003.²

We were trying to figure out whether counting such gatekeepers would be correlated with the trends in counts of journal papers and citations. In our database, science journals were defined as "international" if their editorial boards included scientists from at least eight countries, regardless of the journal title used. The "international" label in the title of some journals may hide...