A Simple Model of Interaction between Journals, Authors and Editorial Board Members

Recently, quantitative study on complex systems has become an attractive research area for physicists. Human scientific activity, including scientific paper publication, is an important complex system and therefore deserves an investigation. We present a simple model to describe the interaction between journals, authors and editorial board members. In the model the probabilities, with which a journal accepts papers from an author or invites him as an editorial board member, obey normal distributions. However, the most probable value of the latter distribution shifts such that the journal can have higher level authors being its editorial board members. The analytic derivation by the model is in rather good agreement with the empirical observation from the selected fifteen worldwide journals with different impact factors.