Table 4: Journals by subject category.
The five raters identified 385 free text responses that were rated ‘unaccountable’ and 140 that were rated ‘not applicable’. These responses were excluded from the subsequent qualitative analysis.
94 journals recorded a mean SA-score of 2 or higher, whereas we recorded 45 journals with a mean R-score of 2 or higher. Mean SA-scores overall were higher than R-scores (2.17 vs. 1.87; difference = -0.30). Scores varied only marginally by subject category; in every case SA-scores were higher than R-scores, with R-scores less variable across subject area (SA-scores range = 0.23, compared with R-scores range = 0.14; Supplementary Table 3).
We found greater variation when considering the scores by Essential Area (Table 5). The highest average SA-score was for Ethics, with R-scores differing only marginally, whereas rhere was a much larger difference between the SA-scores and R-scores for Usefulness.