Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences: topic
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Reducing the cost of facilitating peer review
Graham Steel
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 15:20 UTC
Martijn J. Schuemie and Jan A. Kors, Jane: Suggesting Journals, Finding Experts, Bioinformatics, January 28, 2008.
Abstract: With an exponentially growing number of articles being published every year, scientists can use some help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work.
Jane (Journal/Author Name Estimator) is a freely available web-based application that, on the basis of a sample text (e.g., the title and abstract of a manuscript), can suggest journals and experts who have published similar articles.
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Replies
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I would not primarily recommend an automatic selector such as this for deciding where to submit your articles.
When people want to submit a paper, they will have given talks about the work and circulated drafts for comments from others in the field. That is a good time to ask for suggestions and advice about journals in which to publish.
The scientist is then well-advised to read the journal’s author guidance on its website, to find out about editorial scope, impact factor and so on.
I think it is possibly quite counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published. Other journals are the same – most of them are looking for distinctive articles, not incremental repeats.
Rather than relying on computers, I highly recommend looking at our free Author and Reviewers’ website for writing advice from there you can go straight to a great set of articles written by professional journal editors about how, where, why to submit and publish at the free science-information website SciDev.Net.
As well as this, scientists can upload a draft manuscript into a community preprint server, where others in the field can comment and suggest. (Nature Precedings is one such, which provides meta-features such as alerting people in the field when new preprints have been uploaded, but many others. ArXiv is another, for the physical sciences)
I think it will be a sad day, if science journals publish “articles selected for us by computer”! -
There is a stray semi-colon in my link above to the A&R website. Try this one .
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I just tried out Jane and was advised to submit my paper to the Saudi Medical Journal—the abstract I used had nothing to do with medicine, and why Saudi I have no idea!
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I have tried out Jane a bit and it seems potentially quite useful. I have pasted in recent abstracts from papers we are planning to submit and it came up with suggestions that fit what I would have expected but with a few journals I had not thought of.
Also – I particularly like the fact that it highlights the Open Access aspects of the journal. I agree with Maxine that for some high profile journals like Nature, Science and PLoS Biology, that matching to the journal may not work out well because the editors likely will not want papers too similar to ones they have published before. But other than that limitation the system so far has impressed me. I did not have any experiences like Maxine with completely strange journals popping up but I do not know what she put into the system.
I also agree with Maxine that one should not submit a paper to a journal just because this tool says it is a good match and that talking to scientists and looking at the journal is a good idea. But I do not share her strong negative feelings
I think this has significant value in helping scientists.In particular, I really like the “identify authors” function which could be very useful in finding reviewers for papers.
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I agree with Jonathan. It is just another way to find some potentially useful contacts and journals. It came up with some very reasonable suggestions for one of my abstracts.
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One way in which it might be useful is for academic editors of journals to help them in selecting peer-reviewers, particularly for journals in disciplines not covered by Medline (if they are indexed in Jane) – eg ecology journals.
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