What Makes an Academic Journal “Good”?
scholarly publishing
How to Find a Missing Article
When you’re hot on the trail of an article and suddenly the link is broken or the piece mysteriously vanishes, what can you do? Don’t panic! Here are a few things you can try:
Go directly to the database
If you are searching for an article in the QuickSearch bar on the Libraries website, and clicking on the link takes you to an error page, try going directly to that database and performing a search there. You can also take your search terms to other databases related to the subject you are researching, as the article might be available in a different place.
Check for open access options
Like the many Touro faculty who share an open access version of their publications in Touro Scholar, the authors of the paper you are looking for might also have shared their paper in an institutional repository. You might be able to locate an open access version of the article via a search in Google Scholar or by going directly to the institutional repository of the institution with which the authors are affiliated.
Contact a librarian
You don’t have to search alone! If you are having a challenging time finding the article you are looking for, reach out to your campus librarian for assistance. We can help you explore other places where your article might be hiding or help you find another option that suits your research needs.
Email the author
The author of the article you are looking for might be able to send you a copy of it via email. Many researchers are happy to share their work with students and colleagues, but remember that not everyone is able to do so, especially at this time; be patient if you try to get the article this way, and consider other options, especially if you need the article soon.
Request it through Interlibrary Loan
Because many libraries have closed their physical locations during the pandemic, interlibrary loan is limited at this time. Consider this your last choice option if you are not able to track down the article using any of the other approaches listed here and be prepared to seek other options if your request cannot be fulfilled.
PlumX: Who is talking about my research?
Plum Analytics, or PlumX, belongs to the small but increasingly influential community of altmetrics data providers (one provider is confusingly named Altmetric). The term altmetrics (alternative metrics) was first introduced in 2010 by Jason Priem. Simply put, they are alternative research metrics because they supplement traditional bibliometrics. Traditional metrics include citation counts, journal impact factor, and an author’s H-index. These are often compiled months to years after research is published. PlumX metrics provide us with immediate details on the ways people interact with individual pieces of research in the online environment, whether that research output is a scholarly article or a podcast, a policy document, dataset, video, or one of more than 60 other formats. PlumX generates metrics via access to data providers like YouTube, Twitter, SSRN, Crossref and many others. These metrics are divided into five categories: usage, captures, mentions, citations, and social media.
Usage
Usage helps us understand if users are downloading or reading the work. Touro Scholar reports download counts, or how many times people click download, for instance. When users land on a page or click a link to a page from a variety of sources, these also get counted as it’s likely the user is reading the abstract or at least is interested in the work itself.
Captures
Captures can be leading indicators of citations, because if someone is saving the work via a citation manager or bookmark manager, they probably are going to use that work as a reference later on in their own work.
Citations
This is one of the most traditional bibliometrics, how many times a work is cited by another work. PlumX gathers this metric from at least 15 citation metrics sources, including Dynamed Plus Topics, Scopus, Crossref, and PubMed. It’s important to remember that this metric says little about how the work is cited by another work (take a look at scite.ai to see an emerging example of citation analysis with machine learning). Still citation counts are fundamental to bibliometrics, and indexes of citations in law, medicine, and other fields are centuries old.
Mentions
Mentions are meant to measure conversation around works, via blogs, comments, video streaming sites, and references in Wikipedia.
Social Media
Social media includes sharing on Twitter and Facebook. It also includes Reddit upvotes, ratings on Amazon and likes on YouTube. For academic journal articles, Twitter is a popular platform to share new research. Share with a link to the research (DOI or publisher’s page URL) so that the post is picked up in metrics counts.
Why is this important?
Have you ever wondered how others are accessing or reading any of your academic artifacts? With these altmetrics you will be able to more immediately measure awareness and interest towards your academic work. In a competitive research landscape, PlumX offers metrics to support your research impact footprint, to give you new ways to uncover and tell the stories of your research.
Increasingly, researchers, funders, and universities are using these data to understand and tell fuller stories about their scientific impact and investments.
As a researcher and author, PlumX metrics can help you showcase the impact of your work to others both inside your institution (colleagues, deans, etc.) and outside (grant funders). Altmetrics can help in assessing an academic unit’s research impact and increase its visibility. As a program director, dean of a school, or research support staff member you can track research and demonstrate:
- ROI of research money
- rising stars among early career researchers
- a more compelling narrative about research
- where research is a good potential investment
- the strengths of research at the institution
Instead of a static list of publications, the PlumX metrics provide a live update of interaction with publications. Researchers are already using altmetrics to bolster their funding proposals in tools like the National Institutes for Health’s Biosketch.
How can I access altmetrics about my research?
Touro College & University System Libraries has recently integrated PlumX altmetrics into Touro Scholar, our institutional repository. After you have created an account, click on “Author’s Dashboard” and then on the sidebar, click on the PlumX logo. That’s where you can find PlumX metrics aggregated for all items in the repository authored by you. For your research articles on publisher’s webpages, you can often find altmetrics on sidebars, whether from PlumX, Altmetric, or the publisher’s own data.
If you have a new publication, share the DOI or URL of the article via social media or blog post, and consider depositing your article in Touro Scholar so more readers worldwide can access it.
Please contact us if you need any help with PlumX, altmetrics, bibliometrics or Touro Scholar:
Sara Tabaei: sara.tabaei@touro.edu
Tim Valente: timothy.valente@touro.edu
Caution
We just want to remind you that altmetrics do not replace traditional bibliometrics. Instead, they complement them and show some insights that were previously unmeasured. Like most metrics, there are both legitimate and unscrupulous methods of “boosting” numbers. Researchers should be aware of the ethics surrounding research and authorship by consulting the TCUS academic integrity policy, the norms of their relevant field, and the recommendations of publishers and working groups like the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and others.
This post was contributed by Tim Valente, Scholarly Communications Librarian, and Sara Tabaei, Library Information Literacy Director
Listing Authors on Your Research Paper
In an ideal world, all authors listed on an academic paper would be seen as an equal contributors to the research and of equal importance. However, this is not the case. For a long time, the academic industry has set the precedent that the first author listed on the paper is the primary author who did the most work and is of the most importance. Unfortunately, this precedent has caused much confusion among readers, researchers, and academics alike as to how much each author is worth to each academic paper.
The first author’s name on an academic paper is a much sought after position. The person in this spot often has the good fortune of his or her name associated with the paper, since citation rules often limit in-text citations to the first author’s last name. This causes the rest of the authors in a citation to receive the unfortunate “et al” label. This tradition has led to the assumption that the rest of the authors listed are in descending order of contribution or importance. In addition to the first author listed, the name of the last author listed is also a coveted position since it has been traditionally reserved for the supervisor of a project. In contrast to this traditional way of listing authors, there are a number of other methods used to list authors on a paper:
- Alphabetical – This is a method where by authors are listed in alphabetical order regardless of contribution effort. This is very convenient for large group projects.
- Contribution statement – This method places an asterisk next to each author’s name, with a statement as to what they directly contributed to the article. This is becoming a more popular method, as many journals now require authors to explain their exact role in the research in addition, it is becoming more popular because it allows for more transparency as to how the research was conducted.
- Negotiated order – This is a method whereby authors negotiate and “fight out” among themselves how the author list will be written. This allows all the authors to agree upon how they should be listed based on their efforts. Of course, the downside of this method is that it leaves less powerful members of a research team vying for political support regardless of the work they conducted.
Since there are no rules or standards regarding listing authors, problems can arise from the lack of transparency. The reader has to wonder how much each author actually worked on the research or how much politics played into the decision to list an author first.
There are several solutions to the problem of first author prestige. As listed above, a contribution statement is one of the solutions to this problem. Another solution is ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID is a unique identifier that allows an individual researcher to connect his or her articles and work to his or her name, regardless of what order names appear on the author list of an article. This unique identifier also allows an individual researcher to be distinguished from other researchers who have the same name. This allows authors to clarify what work is theirs and what their accomplishments are.
For more information on ORCID, try these websites:
- https://qa.orcid.org
- https://www.elsevier.com/connect/authors-update/ten-reasons-to-get-and-use-an-orcid-id!
This post was contributed by Annette Carr, Chief Librarian, Bay Shore and was originally published in ‘Significant Results: The Research Newsletter of the School of Health Sciences’ Volume 1, Issue 1. It is reprinted here with permission.
An Exciting Opportunity to Publish Your Research!
It’s Monday morning, and, as you check your email over a cup of coffee, you notice a new message:
From: mdawson@gmail.com
Subject: An Exciting Opportunity to Publish your Research!
Dear Dr. Smith,
I want to congratulate you on all your many accomplishments in your field of research and expertise. I am writing this e-mail with reference to your article published in the field of medicine. Specifically, I have had an opportunity to read your paper: Diabetes and Renal Malignancy in Adults, which was published in The Annals of Medical Case Reports, Volume 10 Issue 3.
I know you are an expert in this field, so it is my honor and privilege to invite you to submit a manuscript to our new journal, The Open Annals of Medical Case Reports. This Open Access journal has a distinguished editorial board with extensive academic qualifications, is double blinded peer-reviewed, and is indexed in EBSCOhost, Ulrich, Informed Librarian Online, DOAJ, ISI, Google Scholar, CrossRef, OAK, and similar indexes. Volume 1, Issue 1 needs only two more articles to publish, so I am pleased to offer you a 30% discount on our APC! If perhaps you do not have a manuscript at this time, we request you to suggest your colleagues to submit.
Please let me know about this exciting opportunity as soon as you can!
Thank you!
Mike Dawson
Editorial Coordinator
The Annals of Medical Case Reports
Have you received an email like this in the past? Perhaps your first thought was, ‘Finally a good place to get my work published!’ Or, maybe you saw a 30% discount and the bargain shopper in you got excited. Maybe, instead you were suspicious: you’ve never heard of this person or this journal. But it’s new, so that explains it. Wait, is it really their “honor and privilege” and why are they congratulating me? Something is off.
The email above is, in fact, fake. We made it up based on samples of messages sent from predatory publishers. The term “predatory publisher” was coined in 2010 by librarian Jeffrey Beall and continues to be used to describe amateurish or fraudulent organizations that intentionally deceive scholars into paying for their works to be published without the value-added services and support that reputable organizations offer, like peer-review, copy-editing, and indexing. Like most social engineering schemes, these predatory publishers use flattery and deceptive tactics to get your money, your research — or both! Similar schemes include invitations to become an editor or attend a conference, where your name and reputation might be used to lure other authors.
Don’t fall into the trap!
We recently received several inquiries from faculty regarding a few questionable publishers’ solicitations. We did some detective work to help make sure that our researchers publish with trusted and credible organizations. Here are some of the ‘red flags’ we check for each time we receive a request from your colleagues to evaluate a journal or publisher:
- Publisher’s direct marketing, or spamming your email, asking you to share
- APC fee is not mentioned anywhere
- The promise of unusually and virtually impossible short submission-to-publication times (2 or 3 days!)
- No clear guideline for author’s submission
- Information on copyright and Creative Commons licenses is absent or unclear
- Non-functional contact information, such as email and social media platforms
- The contact address is residential or represents another business; try a search on Google to check for this
- The names of lead authors or editors are repeated in other journals from the same publisher
- Editors are not known as experts in the field
- The scope of journal is vague or too vast
- Indexing claims use incorrect jargon
This is not a comprehensive list, so remember: when in doubt, contact your librarian! Suspicious emails should also be reported to Touro IT, especially ones with links and requests for personal information.
Additional library resources
- Think, Check, Submit! Choose a trustworthy journal for your research.
- Rubric for Journal Evaluation
- Research & Scholarship Library Guide
- Ulrichsweb: A global serials directory useful for researching if a journal is refereed/peer-reviewed
This post was contributed by Sara Tabaei and Timothy Valente, Midtown Library
Introducing UlrichsWeb: A Periodicals Directory
An authoritative source with over 300,000 periodicals, including scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access, popular magazines, and newspapers in over 900 subject areas, UlrichsWeb has numerous features to guide faculty and graduate students as they decide where to publish, judge the quality and legitimacy of publications, and assess how widely an article might be disseminated in any particular publication.
Ulrich’s platform is searchable and browsable by title, subject, keywords, and more. If you are exploring potential journal titles in which to publish your work, you can jump-start your query with its simple search box, or, if you want to search like a pro, try out the Advanced Search options, where you can limit your search by type of publication, subject area, and key features, such as whether it is peer-reviewed, open access, abstracted, or indexed, or has one of many other attributes.
Since this directory is integrated into the Touro Libraries databases, you can easily discover what journals are available via the Libraries by clicking on the green logo for the 360 e-Journal Portal on the right side of the page. If the journal is available in full-text, you can browse through previously published articles to get a better sense of what kind of publications the journal is looking for.
Ulrich’s provides indexing and abstracting information (you can select this limiter in the advanced search) for a publication with several benefits:
- If you want your published work to be visible and retrievable, it is important to know if the journal of your choice is indexed in databases or resources where it can be retrieved by other researchers, practitioners, and scholars. In other words, the indexing information for a journal can be a measurement of your article’s future exposure.
- The more databases in which the article appears, the more potential impact any given article may have.
- The indexing and abstracting information can also help in identifying journals that are more established and recognized in your field. Predatory journals will automatically be forced out of the game, since they are mostly not indexed in prestigious databases — though some have sneaked their way in, so we have to be always on the alert. See more information on how to avoid predatory publishers in our Research and Scholarship LibGuide.
In addition to the advanced search, you can also narrow your search by checking the options in the left pane. On the results page, you can view the details of a journal title, save or download your list of searches or email them to yourself (note: you need to open an individual account to save your lists for a later date).
If you click on “Change Columns,” you can customize some of the information depending on what you are looking for. Personally, I would add “Frequency” to my search column, since it gives me an idea about how long it might take to get published.
Finally, a small but important space is dedicated to a review or description of a journal’s purpose and its intended audience. This summary helps to quickly determine if your research topic aligns with the scope and content of the journal. On the results page, you can also directly access the publisher’s website with more detailed information on the journal, its submission guidelines, and more.
UlrichsWeb is accessible via the Touro Libraries Databases after you log in with your TouroOne credentials. Please email Sara Tabaei with any questions about UlrichsWeb or to schedule a walk-through of the database over Zoom.
Fun fact: Ulrich’s was originally published as a book in 1932 by Carolyn Farquhar Ulrich, the Head of Periodicals at the New York Public Library. Librarians rock!
This post was contributed by Sara Tabaei, Library Information Literacy Director
Don’t Give Away Your Rights! Copyright For Authors
So, you’ve written an article for a journal. Congratulations! Next, you send it in and wait eagerly for the editor to contact you. Success! Your article has been accepted for publication. But wait! They want you to sign an agreement first, filled with (what looks to you) lots of legal mumbo-jumbo, and there’s something about assigning your copyright to the publisher. But if you sign it, you get to be a published author, so who cares what it says, right?
Not so fast! Continue reading
Altmetrics and You
Have you ever read a really interesting article in a journal like Nature and then shared it on Facebook? Or participated in discussions of a research article on one of your favorite blogs? Retweeted the link to the latest study about whether coffee is good for you or not on Twitter? Then you may have been involved in building altmetrics for these papers! Continue reading
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