We are pleased to announce that PeerJ will soon be included in the Web of Science (WoS), an important indexing site, widely used by the scientific community for article search and discovery. We welcome additional coverage in all indexing services that enable our authors work to be made more discoverable, and we are pleased to be included in the Web of Science.
Together with inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (a database in the Web of Science) PeerJ will also be indexed by Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews and will appear in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Inclusion in the JCR means that that PeerJ will receive a ‘2014 Impact Factor’ in ~June 2015.
PeerJ will be included in the Multidisciplinary Sciences category of the JCR, which also includes journals such as Nature, Science and PLOS ONE. Articles from PeerJ will start to appear in these new databases in the next month or so, and all PeerJ articles will be indexed back to our launch (February 2013).
In addition, PeerJ is already indexed in a number of other global services such as PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Google Scholar, Scopus, Europe PMC, CAB Abstracts, the ACS Databases, EMBASE, the DOAJ, AGORA, ARDI, HINARI and OARE.
Impact factor, responsible usage, and article-level metrics
Whilst we appreciate the importance still placed on the Impact Factor by many elements of the academic community, PeerJ believes in responsible usage, i.e. what the Impact Factor was originally intended to measure. We believe that the individual research article is best assessed on its own merits, rather than the aggregate citation count for the entire journal in which the work is published, hence the reason we signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Just as we don’t believe in paywalls blocking access to content, nor do we believe in an author’s work not getting the credit it individually deserves, which is why we include article level metrics on all of our article pages.
We understand that PeerJ’s inclusion in the Web of Science is very important for the many academics whose research output is still measured by metrics such as the Impact Factor. We hope that this news encourages more scientists to submit their work to PeerJ and benefit from our award winning publishing platform, with article-level metrics, fast publishing times and open access to all articles.