News Release

Faculty of 1000 introduces a unique opinion-based journal metric

F1000 Journal Rankings launched in beta

Business Announcement

Faculty of 1000

Based on the expert opinion of over 10,000 internationally renowned scientists and clinicians, the F1000 Journal Factor (FFj) is a new way of looking at the research literature. A measure of how scientists actually rate journals, the FFj is derived from our familiar rating system of articles, where named F1000 members score research articles as 'Recommended', 'Must Read' or 'Exceptional'. We now use these to generate a score for each journal that has had research articles evaluated by F1000.

The F1000 Journal Rankings enable researchers to see where the best research is being published, as judged by the F1000 Faculty. In general, the more papers that get selected by our Faculty, the higher will be that journal's FFj. Specialist journals with a low volume overall but a high proportion of research articles evaluated in F1000 will do particularly well.

Journals are ranked across all disciplines, but also within each F1000 Faculty and Section. Individual journals may be ranked relatively low overall but come out on top within a Section, showcasing their importance within a specialized field. This enables researchers to find out which journals have the most evaluated papers in their own specialty.

Each month F1000 will publish 'current' rankings based on evaluations of research papers received in the previous 12 months. Each year we will make available historical rankings, based on a calendar year's worth of articles, for easy comparison with the Journal Impact Factor. These will take into account F1000 evaluations received during that year, and up to six ('provisional') or eighteen ('final') months after the end of the year.

The FFj is:

Qualitative—calculated based on the opinions of active scientists and clinicians, experts in their fields. This avoids inherent problems with assessing journals based on citations or download metrics.

Transparent—we make it easy to see exactly which articles count towards a journal's ranking, who selected each article, and why.

Essential—based only on positive reviews of the literature, the FFj enables researchers to discover which journals they need to read, as well as the best places to publish in each discipline and specialty.

Robust—the metric cannot be gamed by self-citation or manipulation of download counts. Our peer-selected Faculty agree to a strict code of conduct. It ignores reviews and other non-primary research articles.

Rapid—most evaluations are received within three weeks of an article being published, and rankings are updated each month.

Commenting on the new F1000 Journal Rankings, F1000's founder Vitek Tracz said: "All systems of ranking have some problems, but we feel it is important to have a new way of ranking journals that is transparent and 'auditable' – you can trace each ranking all the way to the specific judgments of named F1000 Faculty Members. When authors want to decide where to publish, this new ranking service will provide F1000 subscribers with a significant additional tool to make an informed decision."

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For Journal Factor technical queries please contact Dr Richard P. Grant on +44 (0)20 7079 4848 or email richard.grant@f1000.com.

To find out more about Faculty of 1000 please contact Eleanor Howell on +44 (0)20 7631 9129 or email press@f1000.com. For more information, visit http://f1000.com.

Notes to Editors

About Faculty of 1000: Faculty of 1000 is a unique online service bringing together an international network of experts who select research articles from over 3,500 peer-reviewed journals in biology and medicine. More than 110,000 evaluations have been published on the F1000 site to date. Biological and medical research papers are organized into 40 disciplines (Faculties). Faculty Members, who are nominated for membership by their peers, select and evaluate the best articles in their chosen specialties, writing brief, accessible comments that highlight the key findings and put the work into context.

If you are writing for the web, please link to the website http://f1000.com.


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