The dynamics and social organization of innovation in the field of oncology/Editorial boards

Jonah has been working on collecting the names and positions of researchers in the editorial boards of oncology journals throughout their existence.

Journals edit

(document what journals interest us, perhaps even a list stating the progress and links)

We have to date completed a Pilot study of the top ten journals by IF, selected from our larger sample of 52 journals (we selected the top one hundred journals for the period 1990-2015, ordered by total cites, extracted those classed as 'oncology' by WoS, then selected the top ten oncology journals from the subsequent list by impact factor).

This pilot includes (in alphabetical order):

  • British Journal of Cancer
  • Cancer
  • Cancer Research
  • Clinical Cancer Research
  • International Journal of Cancer
  • International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology and Physics
  • Journal of Clinical Oncology
  • Journal of the National Cancer Institute
  • Nature Reviews Cancer
  • Oncogene

A more detailed overview of the progress of accessing and collecting the editorial board info will be uploaded at a later date. In brief, however, the information was collected from several different source:

  • the websites of the journals / journal publishers, which in some cases include front matter or editorial rosters in their online archives
  • the Internet Archive 'WayBack Machine', which takes snapshots of webpages over time and can be used to access some of the old journal website urls displaying ed rosters
  • PubMed Central
  • Physical perodical holdings at McGill
  • Physical holdings at other universities (in this case, UdeM has proven to have the most useful / extensive collection)

In spite of this diversity of sources, it has not been possible to achieve full coverage, and we are still missing editorial information for several journals across several years (most notably the Int J Rad Onco, due to limited physical holdings and a website that has proven 'uncrawlable' by the WayBackMachine).

Record format edit

(document how are structuring the data, the different proposals we had and issues we ran into)

Currently the editorial board info is in Excel spreadsheet format, with one spreadsheet per journal, broken up by column into First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name, Editorial Position, Editorial Subcategory, Year.

The files are available in a Dropbox folder.