CHAPTER 4

Bibliographic Sources for Periodicals

FEILI TU-KEEFNER

The creation of scientific journals began in the seventeenth century. The first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was created in 1665 under the editorship of Henry Oldenburg by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in 1662.1^–3 In the same year, Journal des Sçavans (later Journal des Savants), was produced in France by Denis de Sallo.4 Periodicals are often the most frequently consulted library resources, with journals having a narrower proportion of the user population.5 However, these publications are often the first sources to disseminate information about a new subject or development,6 so currency of the information distributed is a prime feature. In 2004, Tenopir, King, and Bush surveyed medical faculty’s use of print and electronic journals; the results show that currency of content is related to the usefulness of the information.7 Many research findings report that health professionals prefer to read journal articles within the first three years of publication.8^–9

Definition of Journals

According to the ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science, a periodical is “a serial publication with its own distinctive title, containing a mix of articles, editorials, reviews, columns, or other short works written by more than one contributor issued more than once, generally at regular stated intervals of less than a year.”10 The ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science defines journal as “a periodical, especially one containing scholarly articles and/​or disseminating current information on research and development in a particular subject field.”11 In the 2010 eighth edition of the Introduction to Technical Services, Evans, Intner, and Weihs provide detailed descriptions of the categories of journals. The following are the types important to health professional communities: (1) learned journals for specialists (for example, research journal publications), and (2) practical professional journals in applied fields, including medicine.12 The words periodical, journal, and serial are commonly used interchangeably to describe these types of publications.

Health Sciences Information Environments and User Communities

Today, health sciences (HS) libraries are in complex environments; they may serve hospitals, medical schools, academic medical centers, or entire health systems.13^–16 Periodicals, in both printed and electronic formats, are one of the major components of the collections in HS information settings. Overall, they are the most used resources in many HS libraries.17 Butter et al. state that academic health communities consume vast amounts of information, primarily in the form of electronic scholarly articles.18 Many research findings show that health-related professionals use scholarly journals as the preferred sources for cutting-edge information.19^–21 In 1980, Stinson and Mueller surveyed 402 health professionals and identified their health information usage; the findings show that a typical health professional spent approximately five hours per month using medical journals, the most popular sources of information.22 Health-related professionals may also publish the findings of their research and results of their work in scholarly journal publications and that eventually contributes to scholarly communication.23

Medical journals play a significant role in support of health care, education, research, and translational medicine. These resources may affect how physicians provide patient care, as well as how public health professionals develop policies and take action.24 Currently, many health-care providers (including physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals) are required to integrate evidence-based medicine (EBM) models into their practices. Physicians and clinicians must have immediate access to relevant evidence (usually journal articles) when critical clinical decisions are to be made.25 De Groote and Dorsch report that print journal usage decreased significantly following the introduction of online journals, regardless of whether a journal was available only in print, online, or both at an academic health sciences library.26 Due to the increasing use of full-text journals in electronic format, many HS information settings are currently maintaining, but decreasing, subscriptions to printed journals and acquiring substantial collections of full-text journals in electronic format.27 However, the health information user communities expect and demand easy access to current journal resources anywhere, anytime, regardless of their locations.28 Therefore, most HS libraries have chosen to greatly reduce or even eliminate print journals.29^–31

Quality of Health Sciences Journals: Peer-Review Process and Journal Impact Factors

Many HS periodicals are scholarly journals; therefore, they are peer-reviewed publications. The publishers of the periodicals include, but are not limited to, scholarly societies, university presses, professional associations, trade organizations, commercial publishers, and nonprofit organizations.32 The peer-review process means that an article is chosen to be published based on evaluations by the journal editor and a panel of experts on the subject. These experts, known as referees, “are responsible for determining if the subject of the article falls within the scope of the publication and for evaluating originality, quality of research, clarity of presentation, etc.”33

Miguel, Chinchilla-Rodríguez, and de Moya-Anegón state that “journal quality depends largely upon compliance with editorial standards for the presentation and organization of contents to ensure the scientific rigor of all articles published and thereby fortify the journal’s standing.”34 The peer-review process has become an unavoidable assessment used in scholarly publishing “as a gatekeeper for error correction and selection of quality work.”35 Therefore, it is important for HS information professionals to understand the peer-review process and its purposes and why this process is seen as “a mark of credibility and worthiness” of a scholarly journal’s content.36 A journal’s impact factor is another of the most commonly used mechanisms to measure the perceived influence of a scientific research journal.37^–38 It is essential for HS librarians to be aware of impact factor calculations and their importance in selecting journals.

Peer-Review Process and Editorial Policies

The current format of the peer-review process was introduced by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge 100 years after the establishment of Philosophical Transactions.39^–40 The manuscripts submitted were inspected by a select group of the Society’s members and then recommended to the editor.41^–42 Birukou et al. identify key themes of peer-review practices as:

In an editorial published in 2012, Thistlethwaite describes the confidential, double-blind anonymous peer-review system, including the process, procedures, and evaluation criteria used by The Clinical Teacher journal.44 Six steps are taken after a manuscript is submitted online: (1) making initial assessment; (2) selecting and inviting three appropriate reviewers to appraise the manuscript; (3) conducting the external review process; (4) collecting recommendations and then sending them to the editor; (5) considering all the feedback by the editor and making final decisions; (6) returning reviews to the author(s) of the manuscript and distributing final decisions to the reviewers.45 The length of a review can be as long as necessary.46 The Journal of the American Medical Association’s acceptance rate is approximately 9 percent of the more than 3000 manuscripts received annually.47 Regarding the rejection rates, Rockman reports that approximately two-thirds of the manuscripts submitted to The Journal of Clinical Investigation are rejected.48 The rejection rate is about 95 percent for biomedical papers in Nature.49 Undoubtedly, the peer-review process is a necessary procedure to critically assess the contents of manuscripts and to select legitimate papers for publication.

However, the peer-review process is not flawless. Thistlethwaite states that peer-reviewing is relatively unstudied; no research results prove that “peer-review improves the quality of published articles.”50 In addition, subjectivity is an unavoidable bias in external reviewers’ ratings.51 Even though alternative approaches of the peer-review process have been explored, a double-blind, confidential, anonymous peer-review system remains the common practice in HS scholarly journal publishing. Usually journal publishers clearly describe the review process and its procedures in the editorial policies, sometimes including the numbers of external reviewers invited to appraise each manuscript and the length of turnaround time. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine invites two outside reviewers to appraise each manuscript.52 JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) provides the following instructions to potential authors:

HS librarians need to constantly review the scholarly journals’ editorial policies, especially of the heavily used journals. This is an effective approach for monitoring the quality of journal collections. Indeed, journal quality is a primary consideration when researchers seek to publish their research findings.54 Familiarity with the editorial policies of the journal titles with high impact factors can eventually help potential authors choose the appropriate titles and prepare manuscripts for submission.

Journal Impact Factors

The origin of the development of journal impact factor measurements can be traced to the early 1960s. Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher created the journal impact factor to help select journals for the new Science Citation Index (SCI) published by the Institute for Scientific Information (now by Thomson Reuters), which began in 1961.55^–57 As is commonly known, the SCI covers major journals related to the fields of clinical science and life sciences.58 At present, consulting the journal impact factor (IF) information is the de facto approach for determining the importance of a journal.

The method of calculating a journal’s IF is based on two elements: “the numerator, which is the number of citations in the current year to items published in the previous 2 years, and the denominator, which is the number of substantive articles and reviews published in the same 2 years.”59 In this case, it’s the number of citations in a year to all articles published by a journal in the two preceding years divided by the number of articles published in the same two years.60^–61 For example, according to the 2011 Journal Citation Report Science Edition, the New England Journal of Medicine has an impact factor of 53.298 [citations (total = 37,149) /​ number of items (total = 697)]; the interpretation of the result is that each article published in this journal between 2009–2010 was cited on average 53.298 times in 2011.62 If the journal IF value is higher, the scientific prestige of the journal is also higher.63 Users can use the Web of Knowledge’s Journal Citation Reports to search for the IF information of specific journals and to run the ranking report of a list of journals by subject areas.

There has been a lot of criticism on the use of journal IF to measure the influence of journals. In a report published by the International Mathematical Union of the Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research, the authors argue:

However, this practice has become a widely accepted tool for assessing the perceived influence of scientific scholarly journals.65^–67 Many authors use the IF information and the journal’s rank to help determine where to submit their manuscripts. On the other hand, some researchers think that the journal IF report was originally created as a tool to help librarians identify which journals to purchase, not as a measure of the scientific quality of an article’s research.68

HS librarians are responsible for various types of scholarly communication activities, including helping users to identify potential journal sources for manuscript submissions. To users in HS communities, publishing in reputable and influential peer-reviewed journals that have high impact factors and being cited by peers help validate their professional contributions. According to Garfield and Sher (1961), the sociological applications of citation indexes for “personnel evaluation, faculty promotions, and awards, etc.” are also legitimate.69 In a 2013 editorial published in Science, Alberts says that the journal IF “was never intended to be used to evaluate individual scientists, but rather as a measure of journal quality.”70 Goodman, Altman, and George state that journals with high IFs tend to have lower rates of manuscript acceptance;71 Alberts further points out that authors have a tendency to overload highly cited journals with inappropriate submissions.72 Based on Opthof’s research findings, the IF is a valid tool for the quality assessment of scientific journals, but not of individual papers and of individual researchers.73 In the “Sources for Periodical Selection and Development” section, there are discussions of several almetrics, such as Journal Citation Reports, Eigenfactor scores, and the SCImago Journal and Country Rank.

In response to various kinds of flaws and overuses of journal IF in scientific manuscript submission and journal publishing, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) sponsored a meeting during its 2012 annual meeting in San Francisco and developed a set of recommendations by the attendees, referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).74^–75 The Declaration states that the IF must not be used as “a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.”76^–77 Issues related to scholarly journal publications and their influence on the development of professional knowledge will continue to be the central points of discussion. Nonetheless, for the time being, the journal IF remains the current standard for evaluating the quality of scientific journals.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access: Trends and Issues

According to a white paper published by the American Library Association in 2013, “scholarly communication refers to the systems by which the results of scholarship are created, registered, evaluated, disseminated, preserved, and reshaped into new scholarship.”78 In general, the process proceeds from the creation, review, and dissemination of scholarly works to preservation for future access.79 There has been a growing interest in recent years, especially in higher education, in promoting international collaborations for scholarly activities.80 Butter et al. point out that in HS communities, many health professionals and students travel globally for educational, research, and health-care experience.81 Therefore, users prefer to access scholarly resources in electronic format, which can be used without geographic barriers. Moreover, they desire a scholarly publishing infrastructure that is able to meet their needs to reach out to a broader audience with a greater impact.82

Each year, serial costs use up an increasing amount of the total library resource budget.83 Many professional publications refer to this problem as a “serials crisis,” the “results of declining library budgets and rising journal subscription costs.”84 Scholarly journals are subject to rapid price escalations, but no direct connections have been found between price and journal quality.85 Regardless of steadily increasing costs, e-journal collections allow HS libraries to better serve their user communities.86 A lot of recent developments related to scholarly communication first grew out of concerns about increasing costs of information access,87 but the emergent Internet technology is available and mature enough to explore new publishing models and venues. HS libraries and librarians must continue to experiment with more cost-effective and user-friendly alternatives to the traditional scholarly publishing formats for the provision of greater access and contribution to new knowledge.88

Open-Access Literature: Definitions

Suber provides a concise definition of open-access literature:

OA publications have been established on the Internet for a long time, but the term “open access” was coined as a result of the formal launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002.90^–91 In the BOAI statement, two complementary strategies are recommended to achieve the goals of providing “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. . . .”:

It has been argued that the only reason for copyright should be to give “authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”93 In 2012, ten years after the BOAI, a new statement was released to provide more recommendations for the development of OA in the next ten years, including the use of “CC-BY [created by Creative Commons]94 or an equivalent license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work.”95 Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization established in 2001; it provides free copyright licensing tools for authors and media creators who want fewer restrictions on the “sharing and use of creativity and knowledge.”96 CC licenses provide flexibility for authors in protecting and sharing their works with readers, as well as using and reusing their own creations.97 The CC-BY license allows for “unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed,” and the only rights reserved are: “No Commercial use (NC), No Derivatives (ND) and Share-Alike (SA).”98 In order to better understand the status quo of OA publishing, it is necessary to discuss the current business models for publishing, information dissemination and use, and resource preservation.

OA’s Business Models: Gold OA, Green OA, and the Hybrid Model

There are two primary OA journal publishing routes: gold OA and green OA. Following are basic descriptions of these two styles of publication.

Gold OA Journals

The gold OA scholarly journals are peer-reviewed serial publications that offer unrestricted free access to full-text articles. They are funded through article processing fees charged to authors, advertisements, grants, and other sources.99^–100 These periodicals provide immediate open access on the Internet when the articles are published. Examples follow:

Because of the fee structure, the gold OA model is not free from criticism, even though the users are able to enjoy immediate free access to journal articles without restrictions. The article processing fees charged to authors vary, and some fees are high. For example, the fee for Cell Reports is $5,000, and BioMed Central, an OA publisher, charges over $2,000 to authors for most of their journals.111^–112 Some researchers choose to write a publication fee into their grant proposals;113 however, it is not a feasible approach for those independent researchers who have no funding support for their projects. Many academic institutions and their libraries have established OA policies and also provide author funding to publish in OA journals. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) website provides a listing of available open access author funding.114

Green OA Journals

The green OA route (also called post-print archiving or author self-archiving) begins when authors publish their work in traditional subscription-based journals, with the articles eventually being offered for permanent public access via OA repositories.115^–117 The authors may deposit OA editions of the approved final manuscripts or the publisher’s versions, if allowed.118 The authors can choose to post their articles on their own homepages, make deposits to their institutional repositories, or archive their OA publications in subject-specific repositories available on the Internet (e.g., PubMed Central, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​pmc/).119^–120 According to Harnad et al., the self-archiving method has the greatest potential for providing unrestricted public access, and the venues should be the authors’ OA-compliant institutional repositories.121 Issues related to the green route revolve mostly around access to the authors’ published articles.122 A number of journal publishers allow authors to post personal versions in public depositories with the requirement of a delay time.123 The SHERPA/​RoMEO website provides a list of publishers’ copyright conditions for authors archiving their works online in repositories.124

The Hybrid OA Model

Some subscription journals provide authors with the option of paying a publication fee to make their articles open access. This model is the hybrid OA.125^–126 Several major journal publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, have implemented this model.127^–128 For example, Elsevier offers an open access option in over 1,500 peer-reviewed subscription journals, with publication fees ranging from $500–$5,000.129 In addition, Elsevier has agreements with several funding bodies to reimburse article fees to authors who have received research grants from several government agencies and research institutions worldwide, for example, NIH (United States), the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom), and the World Health Organization.130 These agreements help the authors “comply with funding body open access policies.”131 On the SHERPA/​RoMEO website, there is a list of publishers with paid options for open access and their fee information.132

Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Subject-Based Repositories

Institutional repositories, as defined by the SPARC, are “collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single university or a multiple institution community of colleges and universities.”133 Lynch refers to them as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.”134 These repositories are centralized sources that preserve and make accessible the intellectual capital of individual institutions or a group of institutions, as well as providing broader dissemination of scholarly publications.135 Lynch states:

IR resources have become local sources in which authors may deposit their publications. They are also channels to promote the adoption of the green OA model. For example, in 2009, Harvard University’s Countway Library developed a repository to assist National Institutes of Health grant recipients with their manuscript submissions, in addition to offering the authors the opportunity to deposit their manuscripts in the repository.137 The ROARMAP website, a registry of mandatory OA archiving policies, has a list of institutional mandate resources online.138^–139

Subject repositories are “repositories that collect and provide access to the literature of a single subject or a set of related subjects.”140 PubMed Central (PMC) is a good example of a subject-based repository.141 PMC was launched in 2000 and was developed by the NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).142 It is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the NIH/​NLM, which provides permanent access to all the content deposited in it.143 Since 2005, PMC has also been the designated repository for researchers who are NIH grant recipients.144^–145 In addition, PMC is also a repository for participating journal publishers; the Medical Library Association has made the past issues of its publication, Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLS), available on PMC.146^–147 On the PMC website, users can find a downloadable list of the journal titles deposited in the PMC archive.148 Currently, the PMC has two international extensions, Europe PMC and PMC Canada, both of which are supported by the NLM.149 The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) is an authoritative source for identifying academic open-access repositories; the site offers searchable functions by repository contents.150

The NIH Public Access Policy

The NIH Public Access Policy is the legal mandate from the NIH, voted into law by Congress in January 2008, and is a significant facilitator of the OA movement.151 The law states:

Since April 7, 2008, the NIH Public Access Policy has applied “to all peer-reviewed articles that arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs funded by NIH, or from NIH staff, that are accepted for publication,” and the PMC is the “NIH digital archive of the full-text, peer-reviewed journal articles.”153 However, according to the NIH Public Access Policy’s copyright statement, “all of the material available from the PMC site is provided by the respective publishers or authors”154; this leaves the copyright with the author of the work.155 Butter et al. explain these copyright issues and say that not all NIH Policy articles are made freely accessible because the license the article is published under still applies; about 20 percent of articles have OA licenses.156

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In summary, HS librarians face serious challenges in handling scholarly communication and managing their serials collections. Due to the current development of the OA movement, an increasing number of high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarly journals are free for use. Subscription-based journals alone no longer meet user demands. Librarians can consult the PMC journal list to identify qualified titles for their library collections.157 Today, new information is available quickly, and there is a growing interest among authors who wish to see their scholarly output reach out to a wider audience, create a broader impact, and be more open for use and reuse.158 The following section provides several useful sources for finding information on current HS periodical titles, including subscription-based and OA journals.

Sources for Periodical Selection and Development

HS information professionals use a variety of aids for the selection of periodical titles. Some librarians look at what other libraries have in their collections to help them decide what to include in their own journal collections. The information regarding electronic journal aggregators provided by vendors is also a useful tool for deciding what information systems should be included in a library’s print and e-collections.

Catalog and Directory

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