Editorial

Abstract

ReCALL is published by Cambridge University Press but owned by EUROCALL, who updated their mission statement this year. To reflect this, ReCALL has also taken a look at its aims and scope and made a number of changes; the new text features on the inside front cover and on the journal homepage, as does the list of people participating in work for ReCALL. Continuing the policy established in 2016, a third of the members of the Editorial Board have been contacted to renew their membership; among the Associate Editors, Linda Bradley and Frederik Cornillie have had to stand down due to changing work commitments. They will not be leaving us entirely though, as both have agreed to stay on the Editorial Board. Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Shona Whyte join us as Associate Editors in their stead, and both have been assigned their first papers within the ScholarOne system – a steep learning curve at the start! Our heartfelt thanks to all concerned for the work they do. This year we sought proposals from Guest Editors for a new special issue of ReCALL to be published in 2021. Four high-quality projects were submitted, and after discussion by the Editorial Board during the annual EUROCALL conference in Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, the proposal by Elena Martín-Monje (UNED, Spain) and Kate Borthwick (University of Southampton, UK) was accepted on the topic “Researching massive open online courses for language teaching and learning.” The call for papers is now out, and we look forward to receiving your submissions. ReCALL’s impact factor, as calculated by Clarivate Analytics, has dropped from 2.206 to 1.361 in 2018, slightly above the figure for 2015. This might sound disappointing, but ReCALL is still among the top journals in CALL and in the top 50 journals in linguistics as a whole. More telling, nearly 3,000 articles were downloaded from ReCALL every month in 2018. There are good reasons to be wary of impact factor and other bibliometric measures, as I noted last January when the figures were higher: “While such metrics have their uses, they also have their limits, especially in fields such as human and social sciences with relatively low figures: what counts is the quality of submissions and publications in providing first-class research in the field.” The low numbers in fields such as linguistics mean that major fluctuations are inevitable and partly random, and not particularly meaningful: it might be likened to asking someone if they would like 1.4 or 2.2 grains of sugar in their coffee – you would be hard pressed to taste the difference. So why are the scores so low in linguistics and related fields? First, in the main calculation, any references that are more than two years old do not contribute to the impact factor of the sources cited. In linguistics, the half-life of publication is more than 10 years (i.e. half the references are more than 10 years old), as the field does not evolve as fast as in, say, biology or psychology, and it can be important to establish continuity by referring to older work. Second, the turnaround in linguistics is generally quite slow: if a paper takes two years from submission to publication, any references again will not contribute to the impact factor. In fields such as biochemistry, it is not uncommon for papers to appear online within a month of submission. In ReCALL, and other journals, all I can say is that we try to be as quick as possible but could always do better. Anyway, the point is that a high impact factor is always nice, but we should be careful not to rely too heavily on it. The San Francisco Declaration on Research