Picker produces paper publication proposals - March 03, 2008
If you are reading this blog as a distraction from submitting research for publication, it’s your lucky day. Martijn Schuemie and Jan Kors of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have come up with a tool to make life easier.
Rather than racking your brain to decide which journal is most likely to publish your work, their computer program – called Journal/Author Name Estimator or Jane –will take a paper’s title or abstract and tell you where to take it.
“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,” Schuemie and Kors explain in a paper from the Bioinformatics journal.
Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, who is also academic editor-in-chief at PLoS Biology, reckons Jane is “freaky and cool” (blog). Over on Nature Network one of our editors, Maxine Clarke, is not so enthused:
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.How well Jane works is clearly a key question. So I put it through a rigorous scientific test…
...
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!
First up: how about the new paper from Schuemie and Kors? What will Jane make of its own birth certificate?
Using just the title, the program suggests putting it in medical bible, the Cochrane database of systematic reviews. Hmmm.
How about with the full abstract? This time it suggests Rural and remote health. OK, so not a great success there.
For a more rigorous test I ran ten pieces from the latest Nature through Jane (one article and nine research letters). Using just the titles it picked Nature as the best journal for two of them. Using the abstracts it picked Nature for three. It did put Nature in the top ten best journals for the paper on six of them, with titles, and seven, with abstracts.
Still, it’s going to be interesting to see if this takes off. As someone who doesn’t work as a scientist I’m slightly bemused by the idea that researchers wouldn’t instantly know which was the best journal in their field to submit their research to. That said, I might well check on Jane next time I need to find an expert on something.
One final note: Jane says I should submit this blog post for publication in the British journal of nursing...
Image: screen shot detail of the Jane website
Comments
That's interesting (the nursing suggestion) as that was the second suggestion (after Nature) that Thomas Lemberger (EMBO editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology) was given for his test text. As I said in response to Thomas, both journals have an N in their title!
Posted by: Maxine | March 3, 2008 04:10 PM
Sure it has bugs. But it is the promise of potential that it important to me here. It is a fun and interesting idea. And it seems to do a good job of finding authors/scientists even if the journal function still has some issues.
As for scientists not knowing where to submit papers per se, I agree with Maxines commetns on her blog that the best source is journal web sites and other scientists. But there are lots of journals out there. And many people do small projects in fields in which they are not experts. From my experience on journals editorial boards, I cannot tell you how many times I have told people - that paper is not really appropriate for this journal. So maybe if this tool were refined it could help out in such cases.
Posted by: Jonathan Eisen | March 5, 2008 09:01 PM