More on Archaeology Journals, Maney, and SNIPs

Maney is a publishing house that has been been acquiring quite a few archaeological journals. For example, they now publish the Journal of Field Archaeology, Lithic Technology, and quite a few others. I noticed today that some of the journals report something called their "Scopus SNIP." Never having heard of it, I looked it up. Evidently, SNIP stands, not for single nucleotide polymorphism, but for "source normalized impact per paper." Some of the Maney journals do not list this metric, but I don't know why. The metric is, I assume, produced from Scopus data, and the journals that don't have it (e.g., Ethnoarchaeology) are indexed in Scopus, so I'm not sure what the issue us. The same journals are also absent from the Scimago journal rankings (see previous post), which are also based on Scopus data. Perhaps they haven't been indexed in Scopus long enough to produce the metric, but I really don't know. I do know that the number and complexity of journal metrics is quickly becoming bewildering.

One of the new Maney journals is named STAR: Science and Technology of Archaeological Research, which is published in association with the Society for Archaeological Science (SAS). The SAS, then, sponsors not only the prestigious Journal of Archaeological Science, but also the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, a new periodical published by Elsevier that seems to be on its second issue. STAR, however, is open-access, so that may distinguish it from the two Elsevier journals sponsored by the SAS.

Note that the first link in this post should take you to a page showing 43 of the Maney archaeology journals. The content at that link is open and free until April 26th. Take a look. I flipped through Ethnoarchaeology and Lithic Technology and found a bunch of interesting articles I had not seen before.