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When you visit the F1000Research homepage or the page with all articles, you can see that we put our papers into two different categories: Published articles (all articles) and Indexed articles. Since articles go online before they pass peer review, a newly published article will not yet have passed peer review and will not be indexed in external databases yet. (See our glossary for a summary of what “published” and “indexed” mean).

This new system calls for a different way of thinking about newly published research. It’s not just us: more and more life scientists are uploading their manuscripts to pre-print servers or depositing data in repositories. None of those are peer-reviewed when they go online.

At F1000Research we’ve now made it a bit easier to keep track of a published article. If you see an article you’re interested in, and you’d like to be notified when the referee reports come in or when it’s updated or passes peer review, simply click the “track” button. You’ll find the button on the individual article’s page (see screenshot below), but it’s also shown next to each article in a list of article search results.

You can choose to be notified at the end of the day or at the end of the week in which the paper changes, or at the moment it happens. Then you’ll receive an email notifying you of the changes. In this example, the email let me know that there was a new referee report:

On your MyF1000 page (you’ll see it when you’re logged in) you can also choose to select not to receive any further updates after an article has been indexed.  (Authors at F1000Research can update their paper even after it has passed peer review.) On that same page you can also change the frequency with which you receive Table of Contents alerts.

For journalists:

The track article feature is of particular interest to science writers and journalists. Because we publish articles before they’re peer-reviewed, we can’t send out embargoed press releases — the article is already online! When we do send out a press release, it’s for an article that just passed peer review, but that has been online for a few days. By using the tracked article feature in combination with the new article alerts, journalists can keep an eye out on the progress of papers they’re interested in, and perhaps even have their coverage written by the time they receive the alert that the paper passed peer review.