Journal Citation Reports recently released data for 2008. New metrics and features include:

• 5-Year Journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from a journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. For journals in subjects where citation activity continues to rise through several years, this metric allows more of their total citation activity to be included in a critical performance metric.
• Eigenfactor^TM Metrics, comprising the Eigenfactor^TM Score and Article Influence^TM Score, use JCR citation data to assess the influence of a journal in relation to other journals. These metrics, based on five years of citation activity, consider not just the count of citations but the structure of the citation network. Eigenfactor Metrics are available only for JCR years 2007 and later.
• Journal Self Cites provides analyses of journal self citations and their contribution to the Journal Impact Factor calculation.
• Rank-in-Category reveals the ranking of a journal in its subject categories based on the Journal Impact Factor. An accompanying Impact Factor box plot depicts the distribution of Impact Factors for all journals in a category.

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research recently released a resource titled “Author’s Checklist for Preparation of Publications” which outlines a series of tips to consider when preparing a publication.

If you are an author of a book that is in-copyright and registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to January 5, 2009, you may want to explore your options regarding books that are digitized by Google. Please see About the Google Book Settlement for more information.

NIH-funded authors are highly encouraged to consider the following points before  submitting their NIH-funded work to a journal for the peer review process :

• What submission method will be used?
• What version of the work will be posted to PubMed Central?
• Who will submit the work?
• When will it be submitted?
• Who will approve the submission?
• When can the paper be made available for public viewing on PubMed Central?

Learn more about these points and other information related to the NIH Public Access Policy in the Question and Answer videocast by Dr. Neil Thakur.  

See the Public Access Communications and Training  page to view additional training materials on the NIH Public Access Policy.

Are you an author? Do you know what you are agreeing to when you sign a publication agreement form? To learn more about your rights as a an author,  read:  An Introduction to Publication Agreements for Authors by Timothy K. Armstrong. 

Many publishers allow authors to retain a number of rights to their work. Some examples include:

• Elsevier: “What Rights do I Retain as a Journal Author?”
• Wiley-Blackwell: “Author Rights“
• Oxford: “Publication Rights Policies“
• Nature Publishing Group: “NPG Author Licence Policy“

For more information: Authors and Copyright.

Looking for ways to assess your impact as an author? Take a look at some of the following resources:

SCOPUS (subscription required)
SCOPUS provides an Author Search option that allows for a listing of articles, web sources and patents that cite a particular author’s work since 1996. The Citation Tracker feature also allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart (total number of times all works have been cited and the number of times a work has been cited each year) and calculation of the h index for an author since 1996.

• SCOPUS Citation Tracker
• SCOPUS h index 

Thomson ISI Web of Science  (subscription required)
ISI Web of Science provides an Author Finder option that allows for a listing of articles that cite a particular author’s work.  The Author Finder feature also allows for generation of a Citation report (total number of times all works have been cited and the number of times a work has been cited each year) and calculation of the h index for authors (date range depends on subscribed backfiles).  

• Author Finder Tutorial

Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge ISI HighlyCited.com
ISI HighlyCited.com is a freely accessible website that provides a listing the top researchers from 21 subject categories whose publications were the most highly cited for the period 1981-1999.

“ISIHighlyCited.com reveals the face of research–the people behind the accomplishments in 21 broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences. These individuals are the most highly cited within each category for the period 1981-1999, and comprise less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers–truly an extraordinary accomplishment.”

• How Does ISI HighlyCited Identify Highly Cited Researchers?

Google Scholar 
Google Scholar allows for searching of a particular publication and retrieves results from a variety of sources such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, meeting abstracts, web sites, gray literature, and others. The results include the number of times the publication was cited in other resources.

PubMed FaceOff
PubMed Faceoff is a “mash-up” of PubMed, the Eigen factor of a journal and SCOPUS citations. It uses facial expressions as indicators for impact of a publication.

Be sure to check out the NIH Public Access Policy website.  New/revised content includes:

Citation Methods This new page provides guidance on how to cite and locate the PMCID.

Journals that Submit all NIH-Funded Final Published Articles to PubMed Central  This revised page includes the NLM abbreviation of the journal, the eISSN, the pISSN, and the start date of indexing in PubMed Central. The listing of journals is updated at least once a month.

Public Access Communications and Training This revised page includes new PPTs and a brochure that can be used to learn more about the NIH Policy.

Also, there are two new videos that may be helpful to NIH-funded authors:

Submitting an Article to PubMed Central

Approving Submission of an Article to PubMed Central

The 2009 edition of On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research is now available.

Cases of clear scientific misconduct have made headlines in recent years, among them the fabrication of data by a team of stem-cell researchers at Seoul National University and the fraudulent manipulation of photos submitted to the Journal of Cell Biology. Though obvious violations of professional standards may be uncommon, less-dramatic ethical questions confront many scientists in the course of a career: How should credit for a discovery be allocated among a team of researchers? How should a scientist respond if he discovers errors — his own or others’ — in a published analysis? And how can a researcher recognize when a conflict of interest could bias the results of a study she hopes to undertake? This volume offers researchers — particularly early-career scientists and their mentors — guidance on how to conduct research responsibly, avoid misconduct such as fabrication and plagiarism, and think about how to respond in complex ethical situations.

On Being a Scientist is aimed primarily at graduate students and beginning researchers, but its lessons apply to all scientists at all stages of their scientific careers.

How can authors enhance the impact and visibility of their work?

• One way is to use the same variation of your name consistently throughout your academic career. If your name is a common name, add a middle name to distinguish yourself from other authors. Standardize your output to maximize your impact.
• Retain rights to your work in order to reuse your work to promote visibility and accessibility. Many publishers allow authors to retain some rights to their work. See Elsevier’s “What rights do I retain as a journal author?”
• If your work involves potential translational medicine applications, include a discussion of how the research could translate to clinical outcomes. “Impact of journal articles will be improved if they provide a direct line of reasoning for how findings might translate into useful information for real-world behaviors or technologies. This will enhance the probability that the article will affect public policy and thus increase its impact.” See “Publishing in the Psychological Sciences: Enhancing Journal Impact While Decreasing Author Fatigue.“
• Consider submitting your work to a journal that is currently indexed by PubMed. PubMed is a freely available citation database and citations are crawled by Google Scholar.

 
Interested in other strategies? See Strategies for Enhancing the Impact of Research.

Washington University School of Medicine’s Becker Medical Library is pleased to announce the launch of a new website, Assessing the Impact of Research. Realizing that now, more than ever, researchers need to be aware of the impact of their biomedical research, a team at the library has developed a Model for Assessment of Research Impact that provides a practical, do-it-yourself tool for tracking the post-publication effect/influence of that research. In addition to the Model, the site provides an in-depth analysis of the different kinds of research impact and their significance. Included are both guidance for quantifying and documenting research impact and resources for locating evidence of research impact. The website also includes strategies that investigators can utilize in order to enhance the diffusion of research output generated by a clinical or bench study.

For more information, contact Cathy Sarli of the Becker Medical Library.