blog

We went live with the current version of our f1000.com homepage about a year ago, and since that time you might be forgiven for thinking that nothing much had changed with the site (except for our Journal Rankings, about which more later). We’ve actually been busy rebuilding our editorial systems and fixing all kinds of stuff under the hood. It’s been a long project, but now that it’s done we’re ready to start launching some visible updates.

Starting with…

A Redesigned Homepage: Later today, July 30th, F1000.com will be getting a new look. The updated homepage does a better job of explaining what we do, and it focuses on the article recommendations, which of course are the core of our service.

New Terminology: Evaluations or Recommendations? We call them ‘evaluations’, but there’s no such thing as a negative one, so they’re actually recommendations and that’s what we should call them.

Why is this important? It’s important because we know there are people out there who wonder why we never say anything bad. We don’t publish negative reviews because we believe that it’s more important for our Faculty to alert scientists to papers they need to know about than to write general subject-area reviews or do journal club-style critiques. There are plenty of those already. Plus, no one wants to get an email alert full of links to articles they don’t need to read.

Our mission is to select and comment on the most interesting and significant articles published in biology and medicine and, to make that clear, we’re going to start calling our evaluations recommendations. It’s less confusing.

F1000 Trials: At the end of the year, we’ll be launching a new F1000 service that will comprehensively review published clinical trials. All the trials published in a core group of around 300 key medical journals will be listed, with links, and those of particular interest or significance will be highlighted by the Faculty as recommended by F1000. Although the full F1000 Trials site will be a separate program, our Faculty Members’ recommendations will be fed into F1000.com, so you’ll be seeing increased coverage of clinical trials in F1000.

Journal Rankings: Our static listings of journals, ranked by FFj, will be disappearing from the site. You are an uncompromising bunch, and the feedback we’ve received from you is that our Journal Rankings smack too much of Impact Factors and the world doesn’t need another metric like this. Your views were seconded by our International Advisory Board and by many librarians. Another issue is that the rankings as they are have two key weaknesses, one fixable (a flaw in our algorithm that rewards large journals over small journals) and one not (sparse data at the bottom end of the scale). We have revised the algorithm but have decided in any case to give the Journal Rankings a decent burial and use the data generated by our article scoring system in more productive and practical ways. Which leads me on to…

New User Tools: Speaking of productive ways to use our article-level data, we are developing some new tools for subscribing authors that will help them to optimize their reference lists and identify the most appropriate journals for submission of their articles. You’ll have these new tools later this year. And this is just the beginning. Our new head of R&D, Ian Tarr, has many great ideas, and we’ll be adding to the tool set continuously.

Another upgrade on the horizon is for funders, institutes and librarians: We’ll be creating an interface that will make it easy to investigate our database and evaluate the success of grants and research departments. More on these as we get closer to deployment.

And finally,
F1000 SmartSearch: You probably know about the new F1000 SmartSearch already, but in case you don’t – or in case you do but haven’t tried it yet – please test drive it now! It’s a great new service – a PubMed search that learns your preferences as you use it and gets better and better. The reviews we’ve had from Faculty Members and subscribers are really something. And to try it out all you need is a MyF1000 account. So please create an account or sign in, and remember to let us know what you think (so we can learn your preferences too).