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.