Resources for Authors

Author Evaluation, Impact Factors, & Publishing Tools

• American Chemical Society "Publish Your Research" Video Series - Features interviews with prominent authors and Editors of ACS journals about all aspects of the publication process. They provide their unique points of view from their own experiences with ACS journals and offer practical advice for publishing peer-reviewed research intended for interdisciplinary scientific audiences, such as chemistry, biology, medicine, physics, and engineering. .

• h-index - Proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005 as an alternative to the impact factor, the h-index attempts to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. For example, an author with an h-index of 20 has published 20 papers each of which has been cited by others at least 20 times. A higher h-index reflects a higher number of publications that have been cited more often. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications. The index is thought to work properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields. Read more about the h-index - Hirsch, J. E. 2005. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46):16569-16572. http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569.abstract.

• The h-index can be manually determined using databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Each database may produce a different h for the same author, because of different coverage.

• Scopus: use Author Search. In the list of authors that comes up in the search results, click on Details. The Details page provides both the times cited and the h-index, with links to graphs and tables.

• Web of Science: Register for ResearcherID to get your bibliometric data or view a tutorial to learn how to find h-index information in WOS. ResearcherID will automatically update times cited counts and citation metrics as data is updated in Web of Science.

• Google Scholar: Use the Author name field in the Advanced Search form. Google Scholar provides only citation counts for individual articles, not an author's entire career.

• Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE) - A free resource tool for finding the perfect journal in which to publish your research, from The Biosemantics Group. Copy and paste your manuscript's abstract or type in the key concepts of your paper. You will get a list of journals, sorted by confidence score, once you click the Find Journals button. Learn more about JANE.

• Journal Citation Reports (JCR) - via ISI's Web of Knowledge interface provides "Impact Factors" & "Journal Rankings," to help evaluate scholarly journals, using citation data from over 8,400 journals. A higher impact factor generally indicates that this journal's articles have been cited more. (NIH/FNLCR)

• Frederick-National-Lab-in-Print - The Frederick-National-Lab-in-Print database is a collection of citations for journal articles authored by employees and contractors of the National Cancer Institute at Frederick from 1997 through the present. (currently FNLCR onsite only)

Peer Review Resources

• AAAS's List of Peer Reviewed Journals

• F1000 Research - details of initial plan at http://f1000research.com/2012/01/30/f1000-research-join-us-and-shape-the-future-of-scholarly-communication-2/. The plan is to experiment with opening up the formal peer review process to avoid many problems with peer review, including not knowing whether an article has been rejected numerous times before finally being accepted in a 'peer-reviewed' journal to provide scientists with an alternative to existing journal publishing models and will address four issues: 1) Speed. Immediate publication, following a brief internal review; all submissions will initially be labelled as 'awaiting peer review'. 2) Peer review. Submissions will go into a rapid, formal, and open peer review process post-publication to eliminate delays and injustices that often arise in the standard closed peer review system. 3) Research types. A variety of types of research findings will be accepted, from traditional articles to null/negative findings, to replicate/refutation findings. 4) Primary data. Sharing, publication and refereeing of datasets, in the form of separate data papers, to foster collaboration and accelerate scientific discovery.

• Nature's Peer Review Debate - This Nature web debate, held in 2006, consists of 22 articles of analyses and perspectives from leading scientists, publishers and other stakeholders to address these questions. Visit the Peer-to-Peer blog (archive, blog now closed) to join the debate.

• Nature article - "There's a time to be critical," Nature 473 (19 May) 253, 2011 DOI: doi:10.1038/473253a Published online 18 May 2011. Abstract: "An accusation that referees are too demanding and editors too supine demands a response. Authors, editors and referees all have lessons to learn."

• Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future (PDF) - Four Draft Working Papers Prepared for a Workshop Held at UC Berkeley and Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. April 2010

• Retraction Watch - Launched in August 2010, this retraction blog is written by 2 medical reporters. When covering a retraction, they aim to address: how much time goes by before writing the retraction; what action requires a retraction; how much of a public announcement, if any, is made; does a journal with a low rate of retractions have a better peer review and editing process, or is it just not reporting the mistakes. They hope this will form the basis of larger discussions of the obligations of journals. Both writers have experience covering science and medicine for the consumer as well as trade press and seem to come across these issues often. While any particular Retraction Watch post will only carry one of their bylines, they will both contribute to all posts. See Retraction Watch FAQ.

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