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63-535: 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. In addition to research articles, the journal publishes magazine content aimed to be accessible to a broad audience. Article types in this section are essays, "unsolved mysteries", editorials, and synopses. The journal

126-485: A bibliography ). They also deal with research, and are peer reviewed. Meanwhile, trade journals are aimed at people in different fields, focusing on how people in these fields can do their jobs better. They additionally cover information related to work, and include tips and advice for improving performance, but they are not scholarly. Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such as students, researchers, and professors. Their intended audience

189-624: A broad spectrum of disciplines from the general sciences, as seen in journals like Science and Nature , to highly specialized fields. These journals primarily publish peer-reviewed articles, including original research , review articles , and perspectives , each serving distinct purposes within the academic landscape. The advent of electronic publishing has further expanded the reach and accessibility of scientific journals, enabling more efficient dissemination and retrieval of information, while also addressing challenges related to cost and copyright . Scientific journals not only contribute to

252-432: A discussion of similar research. The materials and methods or experimental section provides specific details of how the research was conducted. The results and discussion section describes the outcome and implications of the research, and the conclusion section places the research in context and describes avenues for further exploration. In addition to the above, some scientific journals such as Science will include

315-642: A feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it." Open access publications are accessible without cost to readers, hence they would be expected to be cited more frequently. Some experimental and observational studies have found that articles published in open access journals do not receive more citations, on average, than those published in subscription journals; other studies have found that they do. The evidence that author-self-archived ("green") open access articles are cited more than non open access articles

378-483: 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 . One of

441-686: A good indicator of highly cited articles, leading the author to propose a "Twimpact factor", which is the number of Tweets it receives in the first seven days of publication, as well as a Twindex, which is the rank percentile of an article's Twimpact factor. In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, Université de Montréal , Imperial College London , PLOS , eLife , EMBO Journal , The Royal Society , Nature and Science proposed citation distributions metrics as alternative to impact factors. An important recent development in research on citation impact

504-423: A gradual move towards a license to publish instead. Under such a system, the publisher has permission to edit, print, and distribute the article commercially, but the authors retain the other rights themselves. Even if they retain the copyright to an article, most journals allow certain rights to their authors. These rights usually include the ability to reuse parts of the paper in the author's future work, and allow

567-415: A journal uses to determine publication can vary widely. Some journals, such as Nature , Science , PNAS , and Physical Review Letters , have a reputation of publishing articles that mark a fundamental breakthrough in their respective fields. In many fields, a formal or informal hierarchy of scientific journals exists; the most prestigious journal in a field tends to be the most selective in terms of

630-462: A news section where scientific developments (often involving political issues) are described. These articles are often written by science journalists and not by scientists . In addition, some journals will include an editorial section and a section for letters to the editor. While these are articles published within a journal, in general they are not regarded as scientific journal articles because they have not been peer-reviewed. Electronic publishing

693-510: A scholar's impact relies on usage data, such as number of downloads from publishers and analyzing citation performance, often at article level . As early as 2004, the BMJ published the number of views for its articles, which was found to be somewhat correlated to citations. In 2008 the Journal of Medical Internet Research began publishing views and Tweets . These "tweetations" proved to be

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756-408: A scientific article is citation of earlier work. The impact of articles and journals is often assessed by counting citations ( citation impact ). Some classes are partially devoted to the explication of classic articles, and seminar classes can consist of the presentation by each student of a classic or current paper. Schoolbooks and textbooks have been written usually only on established topics, while

819-491: A small number of very highly cited papers. For instance, most papers in Nature (impact factor 38.1, 2016) were only cited 10 or 20 times during the reference year (see figure). Journals with a lower impact (e.g. PLOS ONE , impact factor 3.1) publish many papers that are cited 0 to 5 times but few highly cited articles. Journal-level metrics are often misinterpreted as a measure for journal quality or article quality. However,

882-685: A statistical method to evaluate the universality of citation impact metrics, i.e., their capability to compare impact fairly across fields. Their analysis identifies universal impact metrics, such as the field-normalized h-index. Research suggests the impact of an article can be, partly, explained by superficial factors and not only by the scientific merits of an article. Field-dependent factors are usually listed as an issue to be tackled not only when comparison across disciplines are made, but also when different fields of research of one discipline are being compared. For instance in Medicine among other factors

945-426: A year. In general, this money is used to fund the activities of the scientific societies that run such journals, or is invested in providing further scholarly resources for scientists; thus, the money remains in and benefits the scientific sphere. Despite the transition to electronic publishing, the serials crisis persists. Concerns about cost and open access have led to the creation of free-access journals such as

1008-446: 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

1071-403: Is a new area of information dissemination . One definition of electronic publishing is in the context of the scientific journal. It is the presentation of scholarly scientific results in only an electronic (non-paper) form. This is from its first write-up, or creation, to its publication or dissemination. The electronic scientific journal is specifically designed to be presented on the internet. It

1134-458: Is abstracted and indexed in: According to Journal Citation Reports , the journal had a 2023 impact factor of 7.8. The journal does not list this impact factor on its website. Instead, the journal promotes the use of article level metrics to provide a measure of the impact of their published articles. Peer-reviewed scientific journal As of 2012 , it is estimated that over 28,100 active scientific journals are in publication, covering

1197-405: Is defined as not being previously printed material adapted, or retooled, and then delivered electronically. Electronic publishing will likely continue to exist alongside paper publishing for the foreseeable future, since whilst output to a screen is important for browsing and searching, it is not well suited for extensive reading. Formats suitable both for reading on paper, and for manipulation by

1260-504: Is others in the field (such as students and experts), meaning their content is more advanced and sophisticated than what is found regular publications. They have different purposes, depending on the type. Articles with original research are meant to share it with others in the field, review articles give summaries of research that has already been done, and perspective articles give researchers' views on research that their peers performed. Each article has several different sections, including

1323-460: Is somewhat stronger than the evidence that ("gold") open access journals are cited more than non open access journals. Two reasons for this are that many of the top-cited journals today are still only hybrid open access (author has the option to pay for gold) and many pure author-pays open access journals today are either of low quality or downright fraudulent "predatory journals," preying on authors' eagerness to publish-or-perish, thereby lowering

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1386-399: Is the discovery of universality , or citation impact patterns that hold across different disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. For example, it has been shown that the number of citations received by a publication, once properly rescaled by its average across articles published in the same discipline and in the same year, follows a universal log-normal distribution that

1449-453: Is the same in every discipline. This finding has suggested a universal citation impact measure that extends the h-index by properly rescaling citation counts and resorting publications, however the computation of such a universal measure requires the collection of extensive citation data and statistics for every discipline and year. Social crowdsourcing tools such as Scholarometer have been proposed to address this need. Kaur et al. proposed

1512-736: Is therefore judged implicitly by the quality of the procedures reported and agreement with the data provided. However, some journals in the field of chemistry such as Inorganic Syntheses and Organic Syntheses require independent reproduction of the results presented as part of the review process. The inability for independent researches to reproduce published results is widespread, with 70% of researchers reporting failure to reproduce another scientist's results, including more than half who report failing to reproduce their own experiments. Sources of irreproducibility vary, including publication of falsified or misrepresented data and poor detailing of procedures. There are several types of journal article;

1575-403: Is wanted, such as physics , the role of the journal at disseminating the latest research has largely been replaced by preprint databases such as arXiv.org . Almost all such articles are eventually published in traditional journals, which still provide an important role in quality control , archiving papers, and establishing scientific credit. Many scientists and librarians have long protested

1638-521: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) family and partly open or reduced-cost journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics . However, professional editors still have to be paid, and PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs; smaller journals do not often have access to such resources. Based on statistical arguments, it has been shown that electronic publishing online, and to some extent open access , both provide wider dissemination and increase

1701-749: The Royal Society (1660) and the French Academy of Sciences (1666). In 1665, the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began systematically publishing research results. Over a thousand, mostly ephemeral , were founded in the 18th century, and the number has increased rapidly since then. Peer review did not begin until the 1970s, and

1764-532: The World Wide Web via hyperlinks that are created 'on-the-fly'. The PDF version of an article is usually seen as the version of record , but the matter is subject to some debate. Electronic counterparts of established print journals already promote and deliver rapid dissemination of peer-reviewed and edited, "published" articles. Other journals, whether spin-offs of established print journals, or created as electronic only, have come into existence promoting

1827-457: The h-index . Each measure has advantages and disadvantages, spanning from bias to discipline-dependence and limitations of the citation data source. Counting the number of citations per paper is also employed to identify the authors of citation classics. Citations are distributed highly unequally among researchers. In a study based on the Web of Science database across 118 scientific disciplines,

1890-512: The 4 million included in this study constitute a tiny fraction. The simplest journal-level metric is the journal impact factor , the average number of citations that articles published by a journal in the previous two years have received in the current year, as calculated by Clarivate . Other companies report similar metrics, such as the CiteScore , based on Scopus . However, very high journal impact factor or CiteScore are often based on

1953-405: The article as long as no fee is charged. The rise of open access journals, in which the author retains the copyright but must pay a publication charge, such as the Public Library of Science family of journals, is another recent response to copyright concerns. Citation impact Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author

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2016-433: The articles it will select for publication, and usually will also have the highest impact factor . In some countries, journal rankings can be utilized for funding decisions and even evaluation of individual researchers, although they are poorly suited for that purpose. For scientific journals, reproducibility and replicability of the scientific results are core concepts that allow other scientists to check and reproduce

2079-507: The author to distribute a limited number of copies. In the print format, such copies are called reprints; in the electronic format, they are called postprints . Some publishers, for example the American Physical Society , also grant the author the right to post and update the article on the author's or employer's website and on free e-print servers, to grant permission to others to use or reuse figures, and even to reprint

2142-416: The authors are unpaid and receive no compensation from the journal. However, their funding bodies may require them to publish in scientific journals. The paper is submitted to the journal office, where the editor considers the paper for appropriateness, potential scientific impact and novelty. If the journal's editor considers the paper appropriate, the paper is submitted to scholarly peer review . Depending on

2205-440: The average number of citations an article receives. Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect authors' rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect

2268-420: The citations that might be obtained at any time of the lifetime of a corpus of publications. Some researchers also propose that the journal citation rate on Misplaced Pages, next to the traditional citation index, "may be a good indicator of the work's impact in the field of psychology." According to Mario Biagioli: "All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Goodhart's law [...] states that when

2331-466: The cost for a print subscription, although this may reflect the number of people who will be using the license—while a print subscription is the cost for one person to receive the journal; a site-license can allow thousands of people to gain access. Publications by scholarly societies , also known as not-for-profit-publishers, usually cost less than commercial publishers, but the prices of their scientific journals are still usually several thousand dollars

2394-399: The cost of journals, especially as they see these payments going to large for-profit publishing houses. To allow their researchers online access to journals, many universities purchase site licenses , permitting access from anywhere in the university, and, with appropriate authorization, by university-affiliated users at home or elsewhere. These may be quite expensive, sometimes much more than

2457-407: The data discussed supports the conclusion offered and the implications suggested. Novelty is also key: existing work must be appropriately considered and referenced, and new results improving on the state of the art presented. Reviewers are usually unpaid and not a part of the journal staff—instead, they should be "peers", i.e. researchers in the same field as the paper in question. The standards that

2520-576: The dissemination and archival of scientific knowledge but also play a critical role in the academic and research careers of scientists. They are instrumental in keeping researchers informed about the latest developments in their field, supporting the integrity of research through reproducibility and replicability, and influencing the direction of future research endeavors. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, with one estimate from 2012 indicating that there were 28,100 that were active, and many more have been published at various points in

2583-491: The exact terminology and definitions vary by field and specific journal, but often include: The formats of journal articles vary, but many follow the general IMRAD scheme recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors . Such articles begin with an abstract , which is a one-to-four-paragraph summary of the paper. The introduction describes the background for the research including

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2646-438: The experiment or calculation to verify the results, or so that they could evaluate whatever the research article's findings were. Each such journal article also becomes part of the permanent scientific record. Articles in scientific journals can be used in research and higher education. Scientific articles allow researchers to keep up to date with the developments of their field and direct their own research. An essential part of

2709-452: The field and advanced students. In some subjects this is inevitable given the nature of the content. Usually, rigorous rules of scientific writing are enforced by the editors; however, these rules may vary from journal to journal, especially between journals from different publishers. Articles are usually either original articles reporting completely new results or reviews of current literature. There are also scientific publications that bridge

2772-419: The field, journal and paper, the paper is sent to 1–3 reviewers for evaluation before they can be granted permission to publish. Reviewers are expected to check the paper for soundness of its scientific argument, including whether the author(s) are sufficiently acquainted with recent relevant research that bears on their study, whether the data was collected or considered appropriately and reproducibly, and whether

2835-399: The following: Scientific journal articles are not usually read casually like a person would read a magazine. Whereas magazine articles can be read in a more casual manner, reading an article in a scientific periodical requires a lot more concentration. Reading an article in a scientific journal usually entails first reading the title, to see if it was related to the desired topic. If it was,

2898-502: The gap between articles and books by publishing thematic volumes of chapters from different authors. Many journals have a regional focus, specializing in publishing papers from a particular geographic region, like African Invertebrates . In the 17th century, scientists wrote letters to each other, and included scientific ideas with them. Then, in the mid-17th century, scientists began to hold meetings and share their scientific ideas. Eventually, they led to starting organizations, such as

2961-419: The latest research and more obscure topics are only accessible through scientific articles. In a scientific research group or academic department it is usual for the content of current scientific journals to be discussed in journal clubs . Public funding bodies often require the results to be published in scientific journals. Academic credentials for promotion into academic ranks are established in large part by

3024-591: The most basic citation metrics is how often an article was cited in other articles, books, or other sources (such as theses). Citation rates are heavily dependent on the discipline and the number of people working in that area. For instance, many more scientists work in neuroscience than in mathematics, and neuroscientists publish more papers than mathematicians, hence neuroscience papers are much more often cited than papers in mathematics. Similarly, review papers are more often cited than regular research papers because they summarize results from many papers. This may also be

3087-450: The most important or most-used titles. There is usually a delay of several months after an article is written before it is published in a journal, making paper journals not an ideal format for announcing the latest research. Many journals now publish the final papers in their electronic version as soon as they are ready, without waiting for the assembly of a complete issue, as is necessary with paper. In many fields in which even greater speed

3150-405: The nature of citation analysis research, allowing millions of citations to be analyzed for large scale patterns and knowledge discovery. The first example of automated citation indexing was CiteSeer , later to be followed by Google Scholar . More recently, advanced models for a dynamic analysis of citation aging have been proposed. The latter model is even used as a predictive tool for determining

3213-467: The next step is to read the abstract (or summary or conclusion, if the abstract is missing), to see if the article is worth reading. Then, if it seems like reading it would be worthwhile, the reader would then read the whole article. Publishing research results is an essential part of helping science to advance. If scientists are describing experiments or calculations, they should also explain how they did them so that an independent researcher could repeat

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3276-423: The number and impact of scientific articles published. Many doctoral programs allow for thesis by publication , where the candidate is required to publish a certain number of scientific articles. Articles tend to be highly technical, representing the latest theoretical research and experimental results in the field of science covered by the journal. They are often incomprehensible to anyone except for researchers in

3339-476: The number of authors, the number of references, the article length, and the presence of a colon in the title influence the impact. Whilst in Sociology the number of references, the article length, and title length are among the factors. Also it is found that scholars engage in ethically questionable behavior in order to inflate the number of citations articles receive. Automated citation indexing has changed

3402-663: The past (see list of scientific journals ) . Most journals are highly specialized, although some of the oldest journals such as Science and Nature publish articles and scientific papers across a wide range of scientific fields. Scientific journals contain articles that have been peer reviewed , in an attempt to ensure that articles meet the journal's standards of quality and scientific validity . Although scientific journals are superficially similar to professional magazines (or trade journals), they are actually quite different. Among other things, scientific journals' papers' authors are experts who must cite everything (and have

3465-772: The rapid dissemination capability, and availability, on the Internet. In tandem with this is the speeding up of peer review, copyediting, page makeup, and other steps in the process to support rapid dissemination. Other improvements, benefits and unique values of electronically publishing the scientific journal are easy availability of supplementary materials (data, graphics and video), lower cost, and availability to more people, especially scientists from non-developed countries. Hence, research results from more developed nations are becoming more accessible to scientists from non-developed countries. Moreover, electronic publishing of scientific journals has been accomplished without compromising

3528-462: The reader's computer will need to be integrated. Many journals are electronically available in formats readable on screen via web browsers , as well as in portable document format PDF , suitable for printing and storing on a local desktop or laptop computer. New tools such as JATS and Utopia Documents provide a 'bridge' to the 'web-versions' in that they connect the content in PDF versions directly to

3591-885: The reason why papers with shorter titles get more citations, given that they are usually covering a broader area. The most-cited paper in history is a paper by Oliver Lowry describing an assay to measure the concentration of proteins . By 2014 it had accumulated more than 305,000 citations. The 10 most cited papers all had more than 40,000 citations. To reach the top-100 papers required 12,119 citations by 2014. Of Thomson Reuter's Web of Science database with more than 58 million items only 14,499 papers (~0.026%) had more than 1,000 citations in 2014. Total citations, or average citation count per article, can be reported for an individual author or researcher. Many other measures have been proposed, beyond simple citation counts, to better quantify an individual scholar's citation impact. The best-known author-level measures include total citations and

3654-475: The results under the same conditions described in the paper or at least similar conditions and produce similar results with similar measurements of the same measurand or carried out under changed conditions of measurement. While the ability to reproduce the results based only on details included in the article is expected, verification of reproducibility by a third party is not generally required for publication. The reproducibility of results presented in an article

3717-411: The standards of the refereed, peer review process. One form is the online equivalent of the conventional paper journal. By 2006, almost all scientific journals have, while retaining their peer-review process, established electronic versions; a number have moved entirely to electronic publication. In a similar manner, most academic libraries buy the electronic version and purchase a paper copy only for

3780-595: The top 1% most-cited authors accounted for 21% of all citations. Between 2000 and 2015, the proportion of citations that went to this elite group grew from 14% to 21%. The highest concentrations of 'citation elite' researchers were in the Netherlands , the United Kingdom , Switzerland and Belgium . 70% of the authors in the Web of Science database have fewer than 5 publications, so that the most-cited authors among

3843-431: The use of non-article-level metrics to determine the impact of a single article is statistically invalid. Moreover, studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank", contrary to widespread expectations. Citation distribution is skewed for journals because a very small number of articles are driving

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3906-614: The vast majority of citations; therefore, some journals have stopped publicizing their impact factor, e.g. the journals of the American Society for Microbiology . Citation counts follow mostly a lognormal distribution , except for the long tail , which is better fit by a power law . Other journal-level metrics include the Eigenfactor , and the SCImago Journal Rank . An alternative approach to measure

3969-407: Was seen as a way of enabling researchers who were not as well-known to have their papers published in journals that were more prestigious. Though it was originally done by mailing copies of papers to reviewers, it is now done online. The authors of scientific articles are active researchers instead of journalists; typically, a graduate student or a researcher writes a paper with a professor. As such,

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