Reliability of scholarly journal acceptance rates

摘要

Some topics regarding acceptance rates of scientific journals need to be more specified when a journal provides the rate itself for its authors and readers. In general, there are some ways to find acceptance rate which might be useful and relatively reliable (University of Michigan Library, 2018). But nowadays, the easiest, fastest and maybe the best way is to inform the rate by journals (or their publishers) through websites and online services. Informing acceptance rate publicly is indeed based on publishing policies of journals and publishers, so in some cases, it may be required to obtain the information using a personal communication with editors, and however, it is possible that we cannot collect any information with respect to the rate in many journals. The focus of this brief paper is on the journals which share the information with their audiences publicly or via personal communications. The acceptance rate (AR) is a main factor of each journal which can be a key point in selecting that journal by its audiences while they are submitting articles or wish to read scientific works. This can also be used as one rationale in determining if a library should subscribe to a journal. Correspondingly, a same factor for rejection rate (RR) may be defined as RR =1-AR.