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A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal

BACKGROUND: The Mendelian Society of Lund launched Hereditas in 1920. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of Hereditas’s hundred-year existence, focusing on the conditions for a learned society to publish a scientific journal, and the journal’s importance for the publication and disse...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Tunlid, Anna, Kristoffersson, Ulf, Åström, Fredrik
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7727187/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33298198
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-020-00164-8
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author Tunlid, Anna
Kristoffersson, Ulf
Åström, Fredrik
author_facet Tunlid, Anna
Kristoffersson, Ulf
Åström, Fredrik
author_sort Tunlid, Anna
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The Mendelian Society of Lund launched Hereditas in 1920. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of Hereditas’s hundred-year existence, focusing on the conditions for a learned society to publish a scientific journal, and the journal’s importance for the publication and dissemination of genetic research. The article focuses on the historical development of the journal and analyses how the content and orientation of research published in Hereditas have changed over the years. METHODS: The historical study is based on the collation and interpretation of archival material, mainly held in the Mendelian Society’s archive, which includes the Hereditas archive. The bibliometric analyses are based on bibliographic metadata from Web of Science (WoS). Together with descriptive statistics, co-citation analyses were performed by using BibExcel, in combination with the clustering and visualisation tool VOSviewer. Journals with articles citing Hereditas articles were identified as a complement to the co-citation analyses. RESULTS: The history of the journal falls into three main periods: a local period, 1920–1959, when Hereditas was primarily intended for Swedish geneticists; a Scandinavian period, 1960–1988, when Hereditas was the official journal of the Scandinavian Association of Geneticists; and an international period from 1989 onwards. The original decision that Hereditas should cover genetic research with no particular specialisation was retained throughout. Its publications demonstrate the continuing presence of genetic research on plants and animals, albeit with a shifting focus, while human genetics emerged slowly and reached its peak in the period 1960–1988. CONCLUSION: In the hundred years of Hereditas’s existence, the publishing landscape has changed dramatically, including a far greater number of specialist journals, changes to the academic merit system, new commercial models for publishing, and digitalisation. Over the years, the journal’s survival has therefore been dependent on the strong commitment of its owners and an ability to adapt to changing conditions.
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spelling pubmed-77271872020-12-11 A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal Tunlid, Anna Kristoffersson, Ulf Åström, Fredrik Hereditas Research BACKGROUND: The Mendelian Society of Lund launched Hereditas in 1920. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of Hereditas’s hundred-year existence, focusing on the conditions for a learned society to publish a scientific journal, and the journal’s importance for the publication and dissemination of genetic research. The article focuses on the historical development of the journal and analyses how the content and orientation of research published in Hereditas have changed over the years. METHODS: The historical study is based on the collation and interpretation of archival material, mainly held in the Mendelian Society’s archive, which includes the Hereditas archive. The bibliometric analyses are based on bibliographic metadata from Web of Science (WoS). Together with descriptive statistics, co-citation analyses were performed by using BibExcel, in combination with the clustering and visualisation tool VOSviewer. Journals with articles citing Hereditas articles were identified as a complement to the co-citation analyses. RESULTS: The history of the journal falls into three main periods: a local period, 1920–1959, when Hereditas was primarily intended for Swedish geneticists; a Scandinavian period, 1960–1988, when Hereditas was the official journal of the Scandinavian Association of Geneticists; and an international period from 1989 onwards. The original decision that Hereditas should cover genetic research with no particular specialisation was retained throughout. Its publications demonstrate the continuing presence of genetic research on plants and animals, albeit with a shifting focus, while human genetics emerged slowly and reached its peak in the period 1960–1988. CONCLUSION: In the hundred years of Hereditas’s existence, the publishing landscape has changed dramatically, including a far greater number of specialist journals, changes to the academic merit system, new commercial models for publishing, and digitalisation. Over the years, the journal’s survival has therefore been dependent on the strong commitment of its owners and an ability to adapt to changing conditions. BioMed Central 2020-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC7727187/ /pubmed/33298198 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-020-00164-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Tunlid, Anna
Kristoffersson, Ulf
Åström, Fredrik
A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title_full A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title_fullStr A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title_full_unstemmed A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title_short A century of Hereditas: from local publication to international journal
title_sort century of hereditas: from local publication to international journal
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7727187/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33298198
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-020-00164-8
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