Dataset on statistical analysis of editorial board composition of Hindawi journals indexed in Emerging sources citation index

This data article contains the statistical analysis of the total, percentage and distribution of editorial board composition of 111 Hindawi journals indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) across the continents. The reliability of the data was shown using correlation, goodness-of-fit test, analysis of variance and statistical variability tests.


Specifications
All the data are in this data article

Value of the data
The data could be helpful in the determination of the impact of journal indexing on scientific publications.
The analysis can be extended to other publishers. The dataset can be helpful in bibliometric analysis.
The dataset can be helpful as a ranking analytics for journals and management of smart campuses. The dataset can be helpful in monitoring the impact of editorial composition in the acceptance and rejection of manuscripts submitted to different Hindawi journals.
The dataset can provide insight to the following: stereotyping in academic publications, duration differences in acceptance or rejection of manuscript, bias in publication. See [1] for the case of management academic area.
The dataset can spur academic discourse on the effect of geographical distribution of editorial board membership on perceived research output using the journals indexed in ESCI as case study. This can be achieved when citation analysis is incorporated. See the conclusions of [2].
Several statistical models and methods can be applied to the dataset for further analysis.

Data
The dataset contained in this article are listed as follows: a. The dataset of editorial composition of 111 Hindawi journals indexed in ESCI. This can be assessed as Supplementary data 1. b. The frequency of editorial board composition of the 111 Hindawi journals and their summary statistics. This is presented in Fig. 1. c. The editorial board membership grouped into six continents. These are presented in bar charts. See Fig. 2a, b, c, d and e. d. The detailed statistical analysis such as correlation analysis, test of normality and analysis of variance e. The detailed dataset showing the Poisson distribution goodness-of-fit test of the data classified into six continents namely North America (NAM), Europe (EURO), Asia (ASIA), South America (SAM), Australia (AUST) and Africa (AFR).

Detailed data description
Hindawi Publishing Corporation is one of the leading academic publishers of medical, technical, social and scientific peer-reviewed literature. Currently, they publish 302 journals that cut across different academic domains. The publisher operates on fully open access model under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The editorial policies of the journals stipulate that they operate without editor-in-chief but rather through editorial boards. Manuscripts submitted to the journals are first processed at the editorial office and sent to an assigned editor chosen from the pool of editorial board members of the journal. The assigned editor is then saddled with the responsibility of sourcing for qualified reviewers for the manuscript. The decision to accept or reject solely rests on the shoulders of the editors. The business model used by the publisher is that indexing determines the article processing charges.
Currently, Hindawi publishing Corporation publishes 111 journals indexed in emerging sources citation index (ESCI). ESCI is part of web of science owned and maintained by of Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters). ESCI has been in existence since 2015 and it includes peer reviewed academic journals.

Experimental design, materials and methods
The experimental design used in this paper is the application of statistical methods targeted at revealing the hidden patterns of the datasets. Text mining was used to extract the dataset from the publisher's website. Similar analysis on statistical methods and the applications in bibliometrics can be found in Ref. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In addition, those works have helped in deeper understanding of pattern of editorial composition, citation analysis, rejection and acceptance rates and others.

Distribution of Editorial board membership (composition) across the six continents
The editorial board membership of the publisher is classified into six continents. The summary statistics is as shown in Table 1.

Percentage editorial board membership composition
Percentage editorial board membership composition of Hindawi journals indexed in ESCI was obtained to show the actual percentage composition across the continents. This is shown in Table 2.

Correlation
The correlation results using Spearman, Pearson and Kendall correlation coefficient are obtained in form of matrices shown in Tables 3a, 3b and 3c.
The distances between the correlations are computed using the following; The application of the transformations and their percentages using Table 3a, 3b and 3c are presented in Table 4. Correlation analysis often reveals some interesting hidden pattern in data. See [17][18][19][20][21] for details.     Table 6 Goodness-of-fit test for Poisson distribution (North America). The result of the partial correlation is presented in Table 5.

Goodness-of-fit test
The uneven editorial board membership composition across the continents necessitated the conduct of goodness-of-fit test using Poisson distribution. The goodness-of-fit results are divided into two. Firstly, the detailed tests are shown in Tables 6-11 Table 8 Goodness-of-fit test for Poisson distribution (Asia). Table 9 Goodness-of-fit test for Poisson distribution (South America).

Table 10
Goodness-of-fit test for Poisson distribution (Australia).

Table 11
Goodness-of-fit test for Poisson distribution (Africa).

Analysis of variance
The data is subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the result is shown in Table 12. Furthermore the boxplot and interval plot of the data are displayed in Figs. 9 and 10 respectively.

Table 12
Analysis of variance of the editorial board composition across the continents of ESCI indexed Hindawi journals.