Whenever I walk down the hall someone pulls me aside and says "Help me Steve! I don't know what journal to submit my paper to. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure who does research similar to me. I need to help find people to review my article. I don't know my own field that I'm publishing in!"
I tell each and every one of them that there's a new system out there called Jane (aka The Journal/Author Name Estimator) which allows you to put text (abstract, title, whatever) into a little text box and it will find journals and people who have written about your topic.
Ok so maybe this is a problem for other fields besides my own. But there are really only about 10 or so journals that take my particular breed of psychology/neuroscience so I usually know which one the pick. And I certainly know exactly who I want or do not want to review my articles. I've probably met at least half of them! Maybe If I was writing something really outside of my field? Then again I'd probably be so uncomfortable doing this that I would find someone in that field to be a co-author. On the other hand if you were a journal editor I'm sure it could come in helpful in order to find reviewers for some random manuscript you know very little about. On the other hand you could just use people that are cited in the references.
So lets see what it comes up with for my most recent talk abstract from Vision Sciences Society entitled, "Popping in and out of existence: The effect of gradual and abrupt occlusion on object localization."
In order of best match:
Vision research,
Perception & psychophysics,
Perception,
Psychonomic bulletin & review,
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance,
Cognition
That's actually not too bad! I'm going to be submitting a very similar paper to Psychonomic bulletin & review. However, I'll be submitting this current paper to Visual Cognition which I doubt has been indexed by this system (it's a fairly new journal I think). So lets see who I should ask to review this paper.
Fencsik D.,
Horowitz T.,
Hopfinger J.,
Ries A.,
Birnkrant R.,
Wolfe J.,
Luck S.,
Vecera S.,
Woodman G.,
Buxbaum L.,
Coslett H.
These are actually pretty darn good as well. But because I really know what some of these people do I wouldn't really consider suggesting them as reviewers. Not that they wouldn't do a good job!
Let's make this a little more interesting...
I'm going to put the text from the psychologist walks into a bar joke into the text box and see what pops up.
Harvard business review,
Insight (American Society of Ophthalmic Registered Nurses),
JEMS : a journal of emergency medical services,
Home healthcare nurse,
Archiv für Kriminologie
Hmm... interesting. Why the Harvard Business Review? The system also tells you what articles are similar to your own that were published in the suggested journal. I'll bet these are some great articles!
21%
Carr N.
Bob's meltdown.
Harvard business review15%
Case J.
When salaries aren't secret.
Harvard business review14%
Connor J.
It wasn't about race. Or was it?
Harvard business review14%
Coutu D.
Losing it.
Harvard business review14%
Suitt H.
A blogger in their midst.
Harvard business review11%
Hurley R.
The decision to trust.
Harvard business review
What do you think of this system? Would it be useful to you?
HT: Bora
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Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see a link to JANE in the article. Google to the rescue?
Doesn't work so well for mineralogy papers. The journals looked random, and none of the pertinent people were listed as reviewers.
To its cretit, though, it assigned everything a very low confidence.
This might actually be useful when composing 'suggested reviewers' lists. And it was reassuring that I came in second as a suggested reviewer for my own papers ;-)
Perhaps not a very complete index yet; no matter what title or abstract I put in I can't get a recommendation over 9% - and those tend to be big, broad journals like Journal of Neuroscience or Nature (hey, thanks for the vote of confidence but I don't think so).
Nice tool. It's worked well with my previous papers. Will I be more likely to be published in a certain journal if I use this to alter my title and abstract so it fits that journal best?
I really like the interface on the tool. It is very slick. I can imagine my grad students enjoying this tool as a jump start for lit reviews. Also cool to find other people doing work on a particular topic. As far as the utility: I input a title about the use of radiology in physical therapist practice and it returned a 30% hit on my targeted journal, but #5 on the list was the journal, "Eating Disorders." Hmmm.
If you do not know the journals in your discipline, you have bigger problems then publishing your research. Do you know what your discipline is? Perhaps you should spend more time in the library reading some journals so you know what they publish. As I remember, the library is organized by topics...
This website is awesome! And very timely...I just submitted a paper today! (We had already decided on the journal, but it did help figure out some of the suggested reviewers.) It was funny -- I put in the abstract and my advisor came up as the 2nd most likely author, and the first was his recent former supervisor/collaborator! haha
I passed it on to the grad students in my department and they think it's great.
Just submitted the first paragraph of a paper in preparation. Obtained for the five best choices (in disorder): "Neurocase : case studies in neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, and behavioural neurology", "Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR", "International journal of language & communication disorders / Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists", "Developmental psychology" and "Seminars in speech and language". Can't guess my field? Me neither... Maybe I need to rethink my career ;-) Or maybe it is a good tool to check whether your first paragraph is clear enough about the aim and field of your study. If the case, mine is obviously not.And I sure think that it is a good tool to start with litterature review, even if it could not provide certain main authors of my field (OK, I cheated a little by wiping out cited authors in the quote). At last, it advises me a French review: is my English so obviously French that even a machine can detect my origin?
Forgot a more satisfying explanation: maybe my work is so revolutionary that it is out of category ;-)