In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.
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. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly universally require peer review for research articles or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields.
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. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
PLOS Biology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003. It is the first journal published by the Public Library of Science. The editor-in-chief is Nonia Pariente.
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.
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.
Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.
Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.
PLOS Genetics is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal established in 2005 and published by the Public Library of Science. The founding editor-in-chief was Wayne N. Frankel. The current editors-in-chief are Gregory S. Barsh and Gregory P. Copenhaver. The journal covers research on all aspects of genetics and genomics.
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.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natural and social sciences, including impact factors. JCR was originally published as a part of the Science Citation Index. Currently, the JCR, as a distinct service, is based on citations compiled from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index. As of the 2023 edition, journals from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index have also been included.
Journal of General Virology is a not-for-profit peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Microbiology Society. The journal was established in 1967 and covers research into animal, insect and plants viruses, also fungal viruses, prokaryotic viruses, and TSE agents. Antiviral compounds and clinical aspects of virus infection are also covered.
The Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development was a peer-reviewed open access medical journal published by the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service of the Veterans Health Administration Office of Research and Development. It covered research on rehabilitation medicine. It published ten issues in print and electronic formats each year. The journal's website contains the full archive dating back to 1964. The journal was established in 1964 as the Bulletin of Prosthetics Research, obtaining its latest name in 1983. In 2017, the journal announced that it would cease publication, to be replaced with a community organised through the open access publisher PLOS.
PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It officially launched in June 2012, started accepting submissions on December 3, 2012, and published its first articles on February 12, 2013.
In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
Article-level metrics are citation metrics which measure the usage and impact of individual scholarly articles.
The Office of Portfolio Analysis was established in the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives in 2011 to assist NIH Institutes and Centers with scientific portfolio analysis. Per the Federal Register, the Office of Portfolio Analysis serves the following goals:
- Prepare and analyze data on NIH sponsored biomedical research to inform trans-NIH planning and coordination;
- Serve as a resource for portfolio management at the programmatic level;
- Employ databases, analytic tools, methodologies and other resources to conduct assessments in support of portfolio analyses and priority setting in scientific areas of interest across NIH;
- Research and develop new analytic tools, support systems, and specifications for new resources in coordination with other NIH organizations to enhance the management of the NIH's scientific portfolio; and
- Provide, in coordination with other NIH organizations, training on portfolio analysis tools, procedures, and methodology.
The American Journal of Biomedical Science and Research is an open-access medical journal for scientific and technical research papers. It is published by BiomedGrid. The journal has been included on the updated Beall's List of potential predatory open-access journals, and has faced other criticisms of its publishing practices. In 2020, it published a fake scientific paper which claimed that a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19 in a fictional city.
