For almost every manuscript I've been involved with, my co-authors and I have had to have a discussion about where (to which journal) we should submit it. Typically, this is a somewhat fuzzy discussion about the the fit between the topic of our manuscript and various journals, the impact factor of those journals (even though I'm not fond of impact factors), their editorial boards (I find that the review process is much more constructive and effective when the editor is knowledgeable about the topic and sends the manuscript to knowledgeable reviewers), manuscript guidelines such as word limits, and turn-around times (which can vary from a few weeks to several months).
I've just learned about a very cool online tool, called JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator), that provides recommendations. The recommendations are based on similarity between your title or abstract and articles published in various journals (their algorithm is described in a paper). This similarity score comprises the confidence of the recommendation and the journal recommendations come with an Article Influence score, which is a measure of how often articles in the journal get cited (from eigenfactor.org). I tried it out using the titles and abstracts of some recent (but not yet published) manuscripts and I thought it provided very appropriate recommendations. Not surprisingly, the recommendations were a little better when I provided the abstract instead of the title, but I was impressed with how well it did just based on the title (maybe this means that I write informative titles?). JANE can also be used to find authors who have published on your topic, which could be useful for suggesting reviewers and generally knowing who is working in your area, but I found this search type to be noisier, probably simply due to sample size -- a typical author has many fewer publications than a typical journal. JANE won't answer all your journal and manuscript questions, but I am looking forward to using JANE next time I find myself debating where to submit a manuscript.
I've just learned about a very cool online tool, called JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator), that provides recommendations. The recommendations are based on similarity between your title or abstract and articles published in various journals (their algorithm is described in a paper). This similarity score comprises the confidence of the recommendation and the journal recommendations come with an Article Influence score, which is a measure of how often articles in the journal get cited (from eigenfactor.org). I tried it out using the titles and abstracts of some recent (but not yet published) manuscripts and I thought it provided very appropriate recommendations. Not surprisingly, the recommendations were a little better when I provided the abstract instead of the title, but I was impressed with how well it did just based on the title (maybe this means that I write informative titles?). JANE can also be used to find authors who have published on your topic, which could be useful for suggesting reviewers and generally knowing who is working in your area, but I found this search type to be noisier, probably simply due to sample size -- a typical author has many fewer publications than a typical journal. JANE won't answer all your journal and manuscript questions, but I am looking forward to using JANE next time I find myself debating where to submit a manuscript.
Thanks for posting this! I tried it myself with some abstracts from papers I'm working on and it recommended journals I was already considering. It looks like a neat tool.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing. It did show a few journals I've considered as well as some authors in related fields when I entered both title and abstract. It provides some nice info.
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