Academic publishing requires solving a collective coordination problem: among thousands of possible publication venues, which deserve a community's attention? A clear consensus helps scholars allocate attention, match submissions to appropriate outlets, and evaluate scholars for hiring and promotion. Yet preferences are not centrally coordinated--they emerge within each field over time. Here we ask whether all fields have arrived at similar solutions to this coordination problem, and whether preferences vary systematically with individual characteristics. Using an adaptive survey of 3,510 US tenure-track faculty yielding 163,002 pairwise comparisons across 8,044 venues, we show that fields occupy a wide spectrum of coordination. Economics, Chemistry, and Physics exhibit strong consensus, with respondents agreeing on elite venues and accurately predicting one another's choices. Computer Science and Engineering show fragmented preferences distributed across hundreds of outlets with minimal overlap. Within fields, preferences correlate with institutional prestige--faculty at elite institutions prefer higher-ranked venues--and with gender, as men prefer higher-ranked venues than women even after accounting for prestige and career stage. Scholars realize their personal preferences more successfully than their respective fields' consensus preferences, indicating that heterogeneity, not just selective hierarchy, shapes publishing outcomes. Journal Impact Factors explain only 64% of preference choices, systematically undervaluing what fields actually prefer. These results quantify how publication preferences vary across the structural diversity of academic fields.

翻译：学术出版需要解决一个集体协调问题：在成千上万个潜在发表场所中，哪些值得学术共同体关注？明确的共识有助于学者分配注意力、将稿件匹配到适当渠道，并在招聘和晋升中评估学者。然而，偏好并非集中协调——它们随着时间推移在各自领域内自发形成。本文探讨所有学科是否已就这一协调问题达成类似解决方案，以及个人特征是否系统性影响偏好差异。通过对3,510名美国终身制轨道教职人员开展适应性调查，获取了涉及8,044个期刊的163,002组两两比较数据，我们发现各学科呈现出从高度协调到碎片化的广泛分布。经济学、化学和物理学展现出强共识——受访者对精英期刊认同一致，并能准确预测彼此选择。计算机科学与工程学则呈现碎片化偏好，分布在数百个期刊中且重叠极少。在学科内部，偏好与机构声望相关——精英机构教职人员更倾向高排名期刊；同时与性别相关，即使在控制声望和职业阶段后，男性较女性更偏好高排名期刊。学者实现个人偏好的成功率高于其所在领域的共识偏好，表明异质性（而非选择性等级制度）对发表结果起塑造作用。期刊影响因子仅能解释64%的偏好选择，系统性低估了各学科的实际偏好。这些结果量化了学术发表偏好如何随学科结构多样性而变化。