The OpenHelix Blog

I remember considering the “Impact Factor” of journals when submitting research papers, and wondering what the impact factor of a specific paper I published might be out of curiosity. Not particularly seriously, my field was narrow enough in my Ph.D. research that there were just a few journals to even consider, so it was usually pretty simple choosing. And for individual articles, I am pretty sure I knew the 4 people in the world outside my lab that were interested in my research (I jest, a little). During my postdoc, my PI was pretty good and choosing journals based on the article, the journal’s audience… and impact factor.

But impact factor measuring has it’s issues (Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact, Neylon and Wu. PLoS Biol 7: e1000242), and there is always a search to measure the impact of journals and individual articles better, or at least differently. Well, one of my favorite science sites and one of my favorite journal publishers ResearchBlogging.org and PLoS, have worked together to measure the impact of journal articles. PLoS has a lot of metrics to see what the ‘impact’ of an article might be, and now they’ve added a metric to see how many times it’s been written about on blogs using blog aggregators like Postgenomic, Blog Lines and Nature Blogs, and now ResearchBlogging.

I like the partnership with ResearchBlogging specifically because whereas the other blog aggregators are not necessarily picking up articles that discuss the science of the article (Postgenomic) or aggregate only a subset of science blogs out there (Nature Blogs), ResearchBlogging is specifically blogs posts discussing the research of  peer-reviewed articles.

Of course I don’t find this particularly useful to compare one article against another (the best articles aren’t always written about, and those that are might not be in the blog aggregators), but I do think this will be great way to carry on the conversation and dig deeper into the research topic.

You can view that metric at PLoS of any article, for example the one I link to above, click on the “metric” tab, scroll down a bit until you see the heading “Blog Coverage.” For that article, you’ll see two ResearchBlogging posts (as of this writing), a metric for this paper about metrics .

A new open access journal, Ideas in Ecology and Evolution, has, well, opened. It’s published at Queen’s College in Canada.

“So?” you ask, “there are lots of journals up starting all the time”.

This one is different. It’s experimenting with a lot of things (ok, so there seem to be a lot of journals experimenting with the model lately). The subject matter is not research per se, but ideas. Having been to my share of ecology and evolution conferences and discussion, I can see this journal has opened itself up to some quite lovely discussions.

As explained by Bob O’hara, there are some interesting review process experiments going on here too. Authors pay to get their ideas published, reviewers are paid, reviewers are not anonymous and they get to publish their views of the article as a companion piece. Bob discusses the issues we’ve all heard about the pros of anonymity (and they are valid ones), but this might work in this case. I also agree with Bob on one point, this structure (reviewers publishing their views) will indeed increase discussion, but I’d too like to see some mechanism for a broader discussion. As it is designed now, it will be like watching TV pundits arguing the finer points of health policy, which I guess is informative, but I’d like to see some mechanism that allows a broader discussion of the article. Something like PLoS has, which I think would actually work better in a journal of ideas like this.

Well, we’ll see. Right now there is nothing there but the editorial. I’ll be watching though.

hat tip: Coturnix

Two weeks ago, I showed you how to use HubMed, an alternative search interface to PubMed, to subscribe to a feed for a specific journal, allowing you to stay up-to-date on new articles and issues of that journal. As mentioned earlier, many journals have feeds to their updates, but using PubMed and HubMed are good alternatives if you can not find a feed, want to customize it a bit or just like a single place to go to for all your feeds. This week, I’m going to show you how to do the same thing, subscribe to a feed for a specific journal, using NCBI as suggested by a commenter in the Tip of the Week a couple weeks ago.

As one of the tools (along with Connotea, Faculty1000, MyNCBI, HubMed, etc) to keep abreast of the fire hose of literature that is published, I also use RSS feeds to keep up-to-date on the latest publications from journals of interest. There are a lot of journals out there that publish a lot of data interesting to me, but subscribing to them all IRL of course is cost prohibitive (and environmentally unfriendly). Many will send updates by email of new issues, but the last thing I need is another email in my inbox screaming for my attention. Getting an RSS feed from a journal is a good way to keep up-to-date on new issues (if you haven’t used RSS feeds, read up on them here, find a reader here). Many journals include RSS feeds to new content, others don’t. Another way to get RSS feeds to a specific journal is to use HubMed in a nice feature that allows you to get an RSS news feed for a ‘search.’ I’ll show you how to do that here.