I produced a brief history of the journal as an artefact and looked into its essential function(s). This work does not address the economic, political, or socio-cultural dynamics of the contemporary scholarly journal ecosystem.
Many thanks to Alan Gorman, Eileen Brennan, Jones Irwin, Martin Paul Eve and Lai Ma for reading over this sometime before I hit the button.
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Tongue in Cheek {image source: Wikimedia Commons}.
The introduction of journal publishing transformed the collective approach to scholarly knowledge creation and dissemination among scholars and other participants in the research lifecycle, including libraries. More importantly, the widespread adoption, expansion, and refinement of journals have pushed aside a hitherto comparatively laissez-faire approach to scholarly exchange while fulfilling specific knowledge functions for the academic community.
Paper-based journal publishing was enabled by the invention of a new (mass) communication technology in the late fifteenth century – the printing press (Singleton, 1981, p. 212; McClellan, 1985, pp. 10–11; Eisenstein, 1980). As a novel form of scholarly communication, journals emerged during the scientific revolution of the Renaissance period in the mid-seventeenth century (Kearney, 1964; Kronick, 1976). At this time, learned societies (see ftn1), such as the Royal Society of London (1660) and the Académie des Sciences in Paris (1666), were established to discuss and advance the interests of scholars, as well as to arrange better and conceptually formalise the proceedings of members’ meetings and their scholarly communications (Hunter, 1994; Académie des Sciences, no date; Hall, 2002). Through a combination of organised individual and collective effort, both societies founded the first not-for-profit journals in 1665: Le Journal des Scavans and Philosophical Transactions. The move towards sharing scholarly knowledge using the journal format significantly contributed to a thriving age of academics from the perspective of the history of modern science and the trajectory of documented scholarship (Morris et al., 2013, pp. 7–8; Chapin, 1987, p. 815). Meadows (1974, pp. 66–86) notes that the methodology of the modern journal also aligns well with changing organisational communication practices and the general expansion of learned societies, as the formation of the former facilitated the coherent and permanent recording of continuous scholarly knowledge outputs in predictable, serial-type formats.
The elevation of journal publishing as an essential practice of scholarly communication required time to establish and embed itself within the expanding scholarly society network. Garvey (1967, cited in Jange and Kademani, 1999, p. 63) points out that by the middle of the 18th century, ten or so journals were in existence, with numbers growing swiftly from about one hundred in 1800 to over one thousand in 1850 and exceeding ten thousand published journals at the beginning of the twentieth century. With the growth of published journals, society organisations and their publications enabled the faster and networked diffusion of scholarly research and argument over time. Increased speed led to more effective sharing and prioritisation of scholarly knowledge among scattered groups of readers, which, in turn, fostered critical examination, quality control, and validation in legitimate scholarly fora. In addition, formally published documents could suddenly be more easily shared and enable authority control (the attribution of author merit and professional reputation) (Mukherjee, 2010; Owen, 2007, pp. 30–31). Consequently, the legacy of learned societies as organisers and channels of formal scholarly communication has both influenced and shaped the journal's developmental path as a valuable and indispensable communication medium, which continues to this day.
Coupled with the idea of the journal's organisational development are the social, cultural, and conceptual practices of peer review, citing and referencing previous scholarly work, and the establishment of manuscript structures and genres. Peer review is the widely accepted standard-bearer for quality control and assurance in scholarly works. Journal editors and scholarly referees (aka the peer reviewers) assess the academic standard and integrity of manuscripts submitted for publication. Editors and reviewers function as status judges who are charged with evaluating the quality of new knowledge and scholarly role performance in a social system (Zuckerman and Merton, 1971, p. 66). The social structure in question manifests in the lifecycle interactions of the scholarly publishing (communication) system. Peer review was formally introduced in the 18th century, and it took another two hundred years of social suffusion to become universally accepted and fully integrated into the disciplines (Spier, 2002, p. 357; Burnham, 1990). Generally, submissions to journals in the sciences have the lowest rejection rates, whereas getting published in the social sciences is harder; publishing is still more difficult in the humanities (see ftn2).
The routine of standardised citing and referencing (the procedure of acknowledging previously published work that informs one’s own scholarly thinking and argument) became widely accepted and adopted among scholars by the middle of the nineteenth century (Kim, 2001, pp. 35–37). Once ingrained, it enabled the close interlinking of current work with previous research, forming a codified, transparent network of the literature (Bazerman, 1988, p. 139). Moreover, the appearance of standardised and identifiable article structures (e.g. introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion and conclusions in the case of original research) and genres (i.e., original research, brief report, review article, case study, methodologies/methods), recalibrated the communication dynamics among scholars at the micro level and, in this sense, affected the approaches of other participants to the research lifecycle. For example, referees must now adequately account for the nature of the article to be effective reviewers, whilst libraries must organise their indexing services to enable targeted distribution and information retrieval for their user base.
Journal publishers and dissemination services – including scholars themselves and academic and research libraries – are critical in facilitating the scholarly conversation. They provide access to and enable the utilisation of published knowledge to grow and enhance fields of scholarly research. Accordingly, the journal's five canonical and broadly agreed-upon functions determine the existential nature of scholarly communities (Horowitz, 1991; Meadows, 1974; Ziman, 1968). These include (1) the establishment of a coherent academic record, (2) the sharing and dissemination of research outputs, (3) peer review, (4) the assignment of rewards and professional recognition, and (5) the creation of scholarly communities. To contribute to and effectively shape these functions, library-based publishers must be knowledgeable operators across all five functional domains.
The first and most important function involves creating a collective knowledge base to provide standardised, continuous access to the aggregate scholarly record. The scholarly record operates much like the support structure of a house, providing a stable foundation for day-to-day scholarly activities (Dougherty, 2018, p. 19). In other words, beyond researching, writing up, and publishing new knowledge, only its permanent archival and preservation by libraries and other services complete the scholarly communication lifecycle.
The second function involves the systematic distribution of the scholarly record, triggered by publication and access through trusted venues such as recognised publishers and libraries. Unlike informal communication, which is often conducted by a limited number of people and is difficult to capture or isolate, the visible dissemination of formally published knowledge captures the importance and endurance of evidence-based facts and ideas, which are not replaceable with culturally defined beliefs, including those held by oneself (Rowland, 1997). Within this context, making scholarly works accessible and stable through formal publication and access collectively serves the needs of authors, readers, and libraries.
A third function of the journal is to maintain stability in formal knowledge, as noted earlier in the role of peer refereeing. Peer-review discourse is a rhetorical device that evaluates the quality of scholarly works (Paltridge, 2017; Thomson and Kamler, 2013). The review report includes an outline and summary of the review, critical feedback, and a recommendation or conclusion. Among other functions, it performs the essential roles of didactic assistance and discipline-specific enculturation for the professional benefit of the scholarly author (Yakhontova, 2019, p. 67 & p. 87). Successful validation moves authorial scholarship into the routine of copyediting, layout editing and final proofing prior to formal publication.
Formal publication, cataloguing and indexing by publishers, libraries and archives register scholarly achievement and trigger the assignment of rewards. This fourth function of the journal customarily materialises in the form of professional recognition, tenure, and research grants if the performance of recorded scholarship creates an impact by conforming to recognised evaluation variables and standards. These include, beyond qualitative aspects, established quantitative bibliometric indicators such as journal metrics (i.e., the ‘Journal Impact Factor’ as a proxy for assessing the quality of research outputs) and personal metrics, such as the number of citations to a piece of published scholarship (Ware, 2015, pp. 864–865; Breen, 2022a; Breen, 2022b). In short, authors and their host institutions reap rewards for their performance based on evaluative patterns embedded within the scholarly communication ecosystem.
The fifth and final function of the journal concerns its capacity to build scholarly communities within disciplinary settings. The existence of scholarly journals implies a degree of sociability among their subscribers and, in this way, constitutes an act of solidarity (Ziman, 1968, p. 61). All of this suggests that the shared socio-cultural context of the journal, in terms of scholarly interests, knowledge, terminology, and interactions, is a baseline requirement for effective formal scholarly communication.
ftn1: A learned society is an independent, not-for-profit scholarly organisation that serves as a forum to discuss issues of interest to its members and constituents and sets professional and scholarly standards for its fields (definition quoted from the FAQ Section of the American Council of Learned Societies) (ACLS, 2025).
ftn2: For an overview of field-based acceptance rates in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, see Björk (2019).
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