STRIATUS/JBJS, Inc., publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery and its family of journals and educational offerings, has announced that The Rockefeller University Press (publishers of the Journal of Cell Biology, the Journal of General Physiology, and the Journal of Experimental Medicine), the Genetics Society of America (publishers of Genetics and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics), and the American Physiological Society (publishers of the American Journal of Physiology, Physiology, Physiological Reviews, Physiological Genomics, and the Journal of Neurophysiology) are the initial publishers participating in the pilot phase of SocialCite, which runs through 2014.
SocialCite is a new workflow tool that interacts with and improves the citation network by providing a new quality metric. By offering readers the opportunity to rate the usefulness and appropriateness of a citation, SocialCite empowers readers, engages them further with the scientific literature, and provides tools for them to provide feedback about the validity and relevance of citations.
Citations are recognised as a key measure of the impact of a scholarly publication. Yet, currently citations include no information about the reason a paper is cited or the quality of evidence being cited. SocialCite uses the existing citation network—the citation linkages between papers plus researchers who interact with the literature—to measure the appropriateness and evidence strength of the citation.
By participating in SocialCite, The Rockefeller University Press, the Genetics Society of America, and the American Physiological Society will be able to offer their readers, researchers, and authors a free tool they can use to rate citations and track these citations and the journals they use through a free dashboard. In addition, the editors and publishers at these journals will have free access to journal-specific dashboards that will give them tools to evaluate the quality of references and benchmark against other journals in the field.
