SO WHERE SHOULD WE PUBLISH?* Alan Baddeley (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, UK) In a recent contribution to Science and Public Affairs (Lachmann and Rowlinson, 1997), the Biological and Physical Secretaries of the Royal Society suggest that the increasing use of bibliometric analysis based on impact factors and citation counts is corrupting the peer review process. They suggest that there is a growing preoccupation with where a paper is published, rather than what it says. Bibliometric measures tend to bias publication towards US journals, where the scientific community is largest, which in turn creates problems for those journals due to overload. Lachmann and Rowlinson reject the practice within the Royal Society’s own peer review process and deplore the tendency of the Research Assessment Exercise to encourage it. Is this a problem within psychology? I think there is no doubt that it is. My attention was recently drawn to a circular in one psychology department that was concerned to encourage publication in ‘high status’ journals, which, it was suggested, means American Psychological Association journals first, Psychonomic Society and other North American journals second, and non-North American journals third. In terms of the commonly used bibliometric measures, I suspect that this is broadly true, but it caused me to reflect on my own publication pattern and to note that of the dozen papers that I regard as my best, not one was in either an APA or Psychonomic Society journal. Why not? Certainly not because of an explicit strategy, though I must confess that I think of APA journals as somewhat conservative, and inclined to reject anything that does not convince all of the, often somewhat staid, referees. The greater the pressures to publish in such journals, the greater the conservatism is likely to become. The bibliometric measures in question tend to emphasize ‘impact’ (citation within the first two years) and more general citation rates. Such measures will inevitably tend to favour short-term factors such as concern with the currently fashionable, and a tendency to use conventional and hence unobjectionable measures. At a theoretical level, pressures for the rapid and fashionable will tend to encourage the sort of simplistic ‘oh yes it is! - oh no it isn’t!’ controversy which has been all too common in psychology over the last 30 years, in which one oversimplification is pitted against another: serial versus parallel processing; analogue versus propositional imagery or more recently conscious versus unconscious learning. At an empirical level it is liable to encourage the ‘experimental goldmine’ based on a simple paradigm allowing endless manipulations. These typically involve countless variations on an established *Slightly modified and reprinted with permission from “The Psychologist”, June 1998. p. 312.