A journal is a specialized periodical that prints articles researchers have written for an audience of their scholarly peers. As such, they are principal sources of scholarly information. Scholars in fields from physics to law regard publishing in journals as an essential part of a research career. Journals are particularly important in the sciences, where journal articles are the overwhelmingly dominant form of communication between researchers. The research journal has a complicated history, however, and even today the seemingly simple label of “journal” can belie an enormous diversity in content and format, especially across disciplinary boundaries.
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the Journal des Sçavans (Journal of the learned), generally regarded as the first journals, began publication in 1665 in London and Paris, respectively. Other journals such as the German Acta Eruditorum (Proceedings of the learned) followed close behind. Articles in seventeenth-century journals were often not accounts of experiments or original research, as we would expect today. The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions, for example, contained an account of recent improvements in optical glass making, a notice about Robert Boyle’s new book An Experimental History of Cold, and a story about the birth of a monstrous calf. The first number of the Journal des Sçavans, a publication focused on political and historical commentary, included a first-person account of a trip through Spain, an essay about a collector’s personal antiquities, and a poem about gardening.
For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most journals either were affiliated with *learned societies, such as the English Royal Society or the French Académie des Sciences, or were the personal projects of passionate editors who wanted to publish interesting knowledge. Learned society periodicals were slow to publish, often issuing just one volume per year or even less. Editor-run journals published more frequently—often quarterly or monthly—and their contents tended to be somewhat more eclectic, reflecting the interests of the person who chose their articles.
The scholarly journal system that researchers use today began to take shape in the natural sciences in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, important scientific discoveries could be announced in a range of formats, including monographs, *encyclopedia articles, public lectures, popular magazines, and pamphlets. By the end of the nineteenth century that was no longer true—the journal article had become the standard *genre for announcing new scientific findings.
The rise of the journal was related to several major shifts in the social and intellectual status of science during the nineteenth century. As science became seen as a more respectable intellectual pursuit, researchers no longer felt the need to present their work to a lay audience in popular periodicals or accessible pamphlets. Instead, because more paying posts for scientific research were being created at universities and in governments, researchers’ professional advancement increasingly depended on impressing their scientific peers. Publishing in a specialist journal for an audience of fellow researchers therefore became more desirable than publishing in any other format. Concern for scientific priority also drove the shift to publishing shorter journal articles instead of longer monographs, as researchers sought to publish their work as quickly as possible in order to secure their scientific reputations.
The natural sciences were not the only research discipline where journals grew in number and importance during the nineteenth century. Members of newly formed disciplines in the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, generally founded journals early in their discipline’s history. Examples of such journals include the Psychological Review, founded in 1894, and L’Année Sociologique (The year in sociology), founded in 1896. In history, the Historische Zeitschrift (Historical journal) began publication in Berlin in 1859 and quickly became a major site of historical scholarship; it was followed by the Revue Historique (Historical review) in France in 1876, the American Historical Review in 1884, and the English Historical Review in 1886. In the *humanities, however, journal publishing remained (and still remains) only one of several genres of scholarly communication. In history, classics, and literary studies, for instance, books are still considered essential vehicles for new research findings.
The practice of sending submissions to journals out for referee reports—opinions about the paper from the author’s fellow experts—also dates from the nineteenth century. That practice began first in learned society journals, where members of societies wanted to ensure that their periodicals reflected well on their organization as a whole. However, the earliest referee reports were often considered confidential documents for a society’s internal use and were not usually given to the author.
Most editor-run journals did not adopt refereeing during the nineteenth century. Editors generally felt themselves qualified to evaluate any contribution that came their way. Significantly, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journals that used refereeing were not seen as more legitimate or scholarly than those that did not. Refereeing was an optional bureaucratic process, not a requirement for scholarly respectability.
During the Cold War, refereeing—or “peer review,” as it was increasingly called—slowly became seen as an essential part of scholarly journal publishing. The idea that a journal had to be peer reviewed to be credible seems to have its origins in the United States. As public interest in science rose during the Cold War, American scientists looked for a way to maintain autonomy over scientific funding decisions without surrendering their new public status. They promoted peer review as an indispensable part of the scientific process, arguing that scientific research would be corrupted if it was evaluated by anyone other than a scientific researcher.
Nonscientific disciplines tended to maintain their trust in editors and were more reluctant to adopt systematic peer review. In 1969, only a quarter of rejected papers at the prestigious American Historical Review had been sent out for referee opinions; the rest were rejected on the editor’s authority. A 1979 survey of history journals found that only 12 percent of them employed external referees to help decide which articles would be printed. Journals outside the United States were also less likely than American ones to employ external peer review in the 1970s and 1980s. The British scientific weekly Nature, for example, adopted systematic external refereeing for all articles it printed only in 1973. As late as 1989, some readers and editors outside the United States viewed the American emphasis on peer review with bemusement. In a 1989 editorial, for instance, the British medical journal the Lancet complained that “in the United States far too much is being asked of peer review” and proudly assured readers that at the Lancet, “reviewers are advisers not decision makers.” Despite such concerns, however, by the mid-1990s few academic journals in any field, or any country, remained peer-review holdouts.
The rise of peer review was only one of the important changes that occurred for journals in the second half of the twentieth century. The number of scholarly journals expanded rapidly, as did the size of many prominent journals. For instance, the 1950 volume of the Annual Review of Psychology contained 310 pages; the 1970 volume contained 628 pages. Even more dramatically, the 1940 volume of the physics journal Physical Review had 2,310 pages, but in 1969—the last year the American Physical Society attempted to publish just one unified Physical Review instead of Physical Review A through Physical Review D—the journal published a whopping 24,533 pages.
The rising number of journals and articles led to overwhelmed readers and librarians, and to attempts to quantify the importance of individual journals in order to prioritize reading lists and subscription money. Most famously, in 1972 the bibliographer Eugene Garfield began publishing lists of *“impact factors,” the average number of citations to each article published in a journal. The implication was that journals with high impact factors were more widely read and more important than journals with low impact factors.
In the late twentieth century journal publishing in the natural and social sciences shifted from a multilingual system, in which important scientific findings might be printed in a number of different languages, to a system in which English is the overwhelmingly dominant language of scientific communication. This period also saw the rise of *“publish or perish” culture in most scholarly disciplines. Hiring and promotion for scholars became increasingly dependent on a scholar’s publication record—with only peer-reviewed publications considered valid.
For most of their history, journals existed entirely in print, but beginning in the early 1990s *publishers began experimenting with electronic journals. Early attempts to distribute journals via CD-ROM were expensive and folded quickly. However, online journals proved to be a far more cost-effective and accessible format. Today, few scholars read print issues of journals cover to cover. Instead, they access most of their reading online through personal or institutional subscriptions to electronic journal databases. Many journals also permit researchers to purchase access to individual articles for a fee, often $30 or more per article.
Since the advent of online publishing, the cost of journal subscriptions for libraries has consistently outpaced inflation. Many scholars are voicing frustration with the economic side of journal publishing. Because researchers are expected to receive professional rewards for their publications directly from their employers, journals do not pay their authors. Most journals also do not pay their peer reviewers (although a few disciplines, including economics, have started compensating referees more regularly). For-profit publishing giants like Springer Nature and Elsevier have increasingly come under scrutiny for their high subscription costs and their impressive profit margins. Some observers argue that all scholarly journals should be *“open access,” with their contents freely available to any interested reader. Open-access journals such as PLOS One are starting to gain some traction; however, the long-term impact of the open access movement on the journal format remains to be seen.
Melinda Baldwin
See also books; commodification; libraries and catalogs; newspapers; professors; publicity/publication; readers