Research Square, a US-based for-benefit organisation which provides tools and services to hasten the pace of scientific discovery, for the global academic community, has announced that launch of JournalGuide, a free tool to help researchers publish faster by choosing the best match for their manuscript from the beginning.
Using a central information hub containing primary data from journals, secondary information from public sources, and perhaps most importantly, the shared experiences of researchers who have previously submitted papers to those journals, JournalGuide helps researchers to quickly evaluate scholarly journals in order to determine which ones reach their intended audience and, therefore, represent the best match for the content of their manuscript.
JournalGuide works by matching scholarly journals to the content of academic papers so that researchers can immediately determine which journals are most likely to have an interest in their articles. Researchers can use the title and abstract of a paper to discover which journals have already published articles on similar topics, in addition to searching by journal name, category, or publisher.
Unlike other search tools, JournalGuide also allows researchers to share their own publishing experiences with colleagues and to learn from others' feedback. Through these shared ratings, researchers can help their colleagues make informed decisions about where to submit their papers. Author feedback also helps journals to improve, promoting a level of transparency that has not been available in scholarly publishing in the past.
While author ratings for journals are anonymous, they are audited by JournalGuide staff. Authors must be logged in to provide feedback and data are presented anonymously and in aggregate. JournalGuide currently is accepting ratings from authors, but is not yet displaying community data.
Researchers who are likely to benefit most from JournalGuide include first-time authors, international authors, and authors who are working on a paper somewhat outside of their traditional scope (e.g. multidisciplinary topics).
While JournalGuide's most complete journal data are currently in the biomedical fields, the team is working with major publishers to add title/abstract metadata from over 30,000 additional journals, and is gathering general information for the journal-specific pages across all disciplines. Robust keyword-driven search in fields outside of the biomedical sciences will be available by summer 2014.
JournalGuide grew out of the need to create a comprehensive database and powerful search tools for Rubriq, another division of Research Square.
