Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields. Content typically takes the form of articles presenting original research, review articles, or book reviews. The purpose of an academic journal, according to Henry Oldenburg, is to give researchers a venue to "impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences."
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.
A public health journal is a scientific journal devoted to the field of public health, including epidemiology, biostatistics, and health care. Public health journals, like most scientific journals, are peer-reviewed. Public health journals are commonly published by health organizations and societies, such as the Bulletin of the World Health Organization or the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Many others are published by a handful of large publishing corporations that includes Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer Science+Business Media, and Informa, each of which has many imprints. Many societies partner with such corporations to handle the work of producing their journals.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.
PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Health and Social Care Select Committee is a Departmental Select Committee of the British House of Commons, the lower house of the United Kingdom Parliament. Its remit is to examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and its associated agencies and public bodies. The Clerks of the Committee are Previn Desai and Joanna Dodd.
Social Science & Medicine is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering social science research on health, including anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, social epidemiology, social policy, sociology, medicine and health care practice, policy, and organization. It was established in 1967 and is published by Elsevier.
Archives of Disease in Childhood is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the BMJ Group and covering the field of paediatrics. It is the official journal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
Perspectives in Public Health(PPH) is a bi-monthly, peer-reviewed, academic journal that publishes papers in the field of public health. It is practice orientated and is published on behalf of the Royal Society for Public Health by SAGE Publications.
Childhood, subtitled A journal of global child research, is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research in the field of childhood studies. It was established in 1993 and is published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the Norwegian Centre for Child Research. The journal's editors-in-chief are Leena Alanen, Daniel Thomas Cook, Virginia Morrow, and Olga Nieuwenhuys. It publishes theoretical and empirical research articles, reviews, and commentaries on children's social relations and culture, with an emphasis on their rights and generational position in society.
Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.
Medical Care Research and Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of health care. The editor-in-chief is Thomas D'Aunno. It was established in 1944 and is currently published by SAGE Publishing.
Medical Decision Making is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of decision-making and medical informatics. Its editor-in-chief is Brian Zikmund-Fisher. It was established in 1981 and is currently published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the Society for Medical Decision Making. A sister open access journal focusing on applications of medical decision making, Medical Decision Making Policy & Practice, began publishing in 2016.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram, and has since expanded to other academic fields. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in London, Madrid, Seattle and Brussels. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Coercive citation is an academic publishing practice in which an editor of a scientific or academic journal forces an author to add spurious citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it. This is done to inflate the journal's impact factor, thus artificially boosting the journal's scientific reputation. Manipulation of impact factors and self-citation has long been frowned upon in academic circles; however, the results of a 2012 survey indicate that about 20% of academics working in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines have experienced coercive citation. Individual cases have also been reported in other disciplines.
Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."
Evidence & Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate & Practice is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the relationship between research evidence and public policy. It was established in 2005 and is published by Policy Press. The founding editors-in-chief were Ken Young and Annette Boaz. The current editors-in-chief are Zachary P. Neal and Caroline Oliver.
