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.
…
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!
How well Jane works is clearly a key question. So I put it through a rigorous scientific test…
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