Dictionary domainTrack A
Scholarly publishing
Vocabulary bridging dictionary entries to the scholarly-literature and editorial ecosystem.
Terms in this domain
96 terms
JAMA Network Impact Factor: Why There’s No Single Figure
JAMA Network's Impact Factor is not a single figure: JAMA Network is the American Medical Association's family of 13 peer-reviewed journals (including flagship JAMA and the open-access JAMA Network Open), and Clarivate assigns a Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Journal Impact Factor separately to each individual title, not to the family as a whole. Neither the AMA nor Clarivate publishes a blended or family-wide figure; any source quoting one number for 'JAMA Network' has either mislabelled a single member journal's figure or invented the number. A searcher wanting a specific figure must specify which of the 13 journals -- JAMA, JAMA Network Open, JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Dermatology, JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Oncology, JAMA Ophthalmology, JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, JAMA Pediatrics, JAMA Psychiatry, or JAMA Surgery -- they mean, then look that title up directly at jamanetwork.com or in the JCR (jcr.clarivate.com).
TechRxiv
<p>A manuscript counts as a <strong>TechRxiv</strong> deposit if it has been submitted to, and cleared the appropriateness screening of, TechRxiv — the free, IEEE-operated preprint server for unpublished research in engineering, computer science, and related technology. TechRxiv's scope is bounded to IEEE's core subject areas (electrical and electronics engineering, computer science, telecommunications, and adjacent technology fields) rather than open to any discipline, and it exists to let authors post a manuscript publicly, with a citable identifier, before or during formal peer review at a journal or conference. The screening TechRxiv applies is editorial and scope-based only: a moderator confirms the submission is a genuine, appropriately-scoped, non-plagiarized research manuscript, not that its findings are accurate, complete, or novel — that judgment is reserved for peer review at whatever venue eventually considers the work for publication.</p>
Research Manuscript
<p>A <strong>research manuscript</strong> is the complete, submission-ready written account of a study — background, methods, results, and discussion (or the equivalent structure for the field) — that an author submits to a journal, conference, or other venue for editorial and peer review, before it has been accepted, copyedited, or published. The term marks a <em>stage</em> in the publication lifecycle, not a content type: the same underlying work is a manuscript from first submission through any round of revision, and stops being called a manuscript once it is accepted and moves toward publication, at which point more specific terms apply — <a href='/dictionary/term/author-accepted-manuscript'>author accepted manuscript (AAM)</a> for the peer-reviewed, accepted-but-not-yet-typeset version, and <a href='/dictionary/term/version-of-record'>version of record (VoR)</a> for the final published form. A document only counts as a research manuscript if it is (a) a structured, complete write-up of original research or scholarship, and (b) has been or is intended to be submitted somewhere for editorial evaluation. A rough draft circulated only among co-authors, or a <a href='/dictionary/term/preprint'>preprint</a> posted to a server outside any journal's review process, are related but distinct in most editorial and funder usage — see the counter-examples below.</p>
Reporting Guidelines
<p><strong>Reporting guidelines</strong> are checklists, flow diagrams, or structured-text tools that specify the minimum set of information authors must include when writing up a specific type of study, so that readers, peer reviewers, and editors can judge what was done and trust that nothing material has been left out. The EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) Network, an international initiative founded in 2006 and based at the University of Oxford's Centre for Statistics in Medicine (NDORMS), is the field's central clearinghouse: it defines a reporting guideline as a checklist, flow diagram, or structured text developed using an explicit, documented consensus methodology to guide authors in reporting a specific type of research, and it maintains a searchable library of several hundred such guidelines spanning study designs, specialties, and report sections.</p><p>A reporting guideline is not a methodological standard. It does not tell an investigator how to design a trial, calculate a sample size, randomize participants, or run an assay -- that is the job of methodological/conduct standards such as ICH Good Clinical Practice, CIOMS guidance, or a funder's data-collection protocol. Nor is a reporting guideline a critical-appraisal or risk-of-bias tool -- it does not score how well a study was conducted (that is the role of instruments such as the Cochrane risk-of-bias tools). A reporting guideline answers a narrower, prior question: <em>given that the study was conducted a particular way, has the write-up disclosed enough about it -- the eligibility criteria, the randomization method, the funding source, the flow of participants -- for a reader to evaluate and, ideally, reproduce the work?</em> An author can follow a reporting guideline to the letter while having run a methodologically weak study, and a well-conducted study can still be reported so incompletely that a reader cannot tell.</p>
ANSI/NISO Z39.56 (SICI — Serial Item and Contribution Identifier)
A code counts as a SICI only if it assembles all three ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1996 [R2002] segments in sequence — an Item segment (ISSN + chronology + enumeration), a Contribution segment (starting page + title-code checksum for the specific article), and a Control segment (structure/version/check-character) — to identify one specific item within a serial. NISO withdrew the standard in 2012; new article-level identification now runs through the DOI.
ANSI/NISO Z39.14 (Guidelines for Abstracts)
ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2015), Guidelines for Abstracts, is an American National Standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) that gives authors and editors guidance on writing abstracts for research publications and other scholarly works -- specifically, texts reporting the results of experimental work or descriptive or discursive studies. It is a guideline, not a mandatory format: it does not set a single fixed word limit or template that every abstract must follow. Instead it covers where an abstract should be placed in a publication, the different types of abstracts and what content each type is expected to cover, document-type-specific abstracting recommendations, style guidance, and worked examples. A document's abstracting practice can be described as following Z39.14 when it applies this general guidance -- consistent placement, content coverage matched to abstract type, and a style suited to standalone use by abstracting and indexing services -- rather than any one publisher's or journal's own house-style abstract instructions.
NISO Z39.29 (Bibliographic References)
ANSI/NISO Z39.29-2005 (R2010), <em>Bibliographic References</em>, is the American National Standard that specifies the data elements and construction rules for citing print, audiovisual, and electronic materials, both published and unpublished. It does not mandate a single citation style (it does not compete with APA, MLA, Chicago, or Vancouver); instead it defines the underlying <strong>data elements</strong> a reference needs to uniquely identify a source (creator, title, date, publisher/source, locator, and medium-specific descriptors) and the <strong>construction rules</strong> for assembling them, organized across fifteen broad categories of material (books, articles, technical reports, audiovisual works, maps, patents, online/electronic resources, unpublished materials, and others). A document or metadata record operationally conforms to Z39.29 when it captures the standard's required data elements for its material category and assembles them per the standard's ordering/punctuation rules — the same underlying logic that named citation-style guides (APA, MLA, etc.) each format differently on the page. The standard was approved by ANSI in July 2005 and reaffirmed by NISO in May 2010 (hence the "R2010" suffix); as of this writing no newer published edition supersedes it, though NISO solicited volunteers for a possible revision in 2016.
SPRE (Strategy, People and Research Environment)
SPRE is the REF 2029 assessment element scoring the conditions an institution and its submitting units put in place to enable research, replacing REF 2021's Environment element (REF5a/REF5b). It is worth 20% of the overall REF 2029 quality profile, combining an Institution-Level Statement (ILS, 60% of the SPRE score) and a Unit-Level Statement (ULS, 40%), each covering context/mission/strategy, people, income/infrastructure/facilities, and collaboration/engagement/impact. Guidance is still being finalised through 2026.
ISO 18626 (Interlibrary Loan Transactions — Application Protocol)
<p><strong>ISO 18626</strong>, <em>Information and documentation — Interlibrary loan transactions</em>, is the international application-protocol standard for the messages that library systems exchange to request, supply, and track resource-sharing loans and copies between institutions. A transaction qualifies as ISO 18626-compliant when it is carried out as a defined sequence of XML messages — a <strong>Request</strong> from the borrowing (requesting) library, and <strong>Supplying Agency</strong> and <strong>Requesting Agency</strong> status/action messages exchanged between the two systems — rather than as free-text email, fax, or a proprietary, non-standard API. First published by ISO in 2014, revised in 2017, and further revised as ISO 18626:2021, the standard is maintained under ISO/TC 46, the technical committee for information and documentation.</p>
NISO Z39.98 (Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing)
ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification (commonly called the A&I Framework, or by its DAISY-side identifier Z3998), is a joint NISO/DAISY Consortium standard, published in 2012, that defines a modular framework for building XML markup languages for accessible, adaptive publishing rather than a single fixed document format. A publication workflow is 'Z39.98-conformant' when its source XML is authored against a document model built on the A&I Framework's shared architecture (a common core vocabulary plus resource-type-specific modules for books, periodicals, and other content types), so that a single authored source can be transformed into multiple universally accessible output formats -- braille, large print, synthetic speech/DAISY talking book, and EPUB -- without re-authoring content per format. It supersedes ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012), the original DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB) specification, of which it is a substantial, non-backward-compatible redesign -- which is why NISO and the DAISY Consortium issued it under a new standard number rather than as a further DTB revision.
IEEE Plagiarism Policy and Prohibited Authors List (PAL)
IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) investigates plagiarism complaints against its journals, transactions, and conference papers using a published five-level severity scale (Level One through Level Five) set out in IEEE's PSPB Operations Manual and its accompanying 'Plagiarism Levels and Corrective Actions' guidance. The scale grades a case by extent of uncredited or improperly credited verbatim copying, from Level One (an entire paper, or more than 50% of one, copied without credit, or verbatim reuse spanning more than one paper by the same author) down to Level Five (verbatim text copied from a credited source but not clearly marked as a direct quotation). Corrective actions scale with the level and with repeat-offense history, ranging from a required letter of apology through a suspension of an author's submission privileges to specific IEEE publications for a fixed period -- commonly cited ranges run from about one to five years -- up to a lifetime prohibition on publishing in any IEEE-copyrighted venue for the most serious or repeated Level One violations, administered at the discretion of the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) Chair. An author under an active submission suspension is added to IEEE's internal screening list -- long known as the Prohibited Authors List (PAL) and, per more recent PSPB Operations Manual language, formally relabeled the PPL -- which IEEE publication volunteers (editors, program chairs) check via an internal PAL Database tool before accepting a submission, to confirm a listed name is not attempting to submit to a venue it is currently barred from.
IEEE Conflict of Interest Disclosure
IEEE conflict of interest (COI) disclosure refers to the author- and reviewer-facing conflict-of-interest rules IEEE applies across its journals, transactions, magazines, and conferences, set out through IEEE Author Center guidance and the editorial policies of individual IEEE technical societies. It is distinct from a generic conflict-of-interest disclosure in two ways specific to IEEE's editorial process: IEEE defines a conflict along three tiers -- actual, perceived, and potential -- rather than a single financial-interest dollar threshold, and IEEE devolves the operational specifics (what a reviewer must disclose, how far back a prior collaboration counts, how long a mentorship cooling-off period lasts) to the sponsoring technical society or specific journal rather than fixing one uniform disclosure form across all of IEEE, the same way the specific mechanics of IEEE's peer-review model are set at the society level rather than uniformly.
CARE Case Report Guidelines
The CARE (CAse REport) Guidelines are a 13-item reporting checklist, developed by an international consensus group and published in 2013, that specifies what a clinical case report must include -- patient information, timeline, diagnostic assessment, intervention, and outcome -- for it to be complete, transparent, and usable by other clinicians and reviewers.
Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary
A mandatory, standardized fillable-PDF form Nature Portfolio requires with manuscript submission for life sciences, behavioural & social sciences, or ecological/evolutionary/environmental sciences research articles, disclosing statistics reporting, software/code, data availability, and a field-specific study-design track (sample size, data exclusions, replication, randomization, blinding, or their track-specific equivalents), with negative disclosures required rather than fields left blank; the completed form is shared with editors/reviewers during assessment and published alongside the accepted paper.
ICMJE Generative AI Policy
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) sets out its rules on generative AI in Section II.A.4 of its Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, added in the May 2023 update. The policy rests on three linked rules: (1) chatbots and other AI tools cannot be listed as authors because they cannot take responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work and cannot approve a final version for submission, so they fail ICMJE's own authorship criteria by definition; (2) at submission, authors must disclose whether AI-assisted technologies were used, with the disclosure location depending on how the tool was used — writing, editing, or proofreading assistance is described in the Acknowledgments section, while use of AI to collect or analyze data or to generate figures is reported in the Methods section; and (3) human authors remain fully responsible for any submitted material produced with AI assistance, including reviewing and editing AI output carefully, because such tools can generate authoritative-sounding text that is incorrect, incomplete, or biased.
IEEE Generative AI Policy
IEEE has no single unified 'AI policy' document; instead it implements two distinct sets of generative-AI rules, disseminated consistently across its journals, transactions, and conferences via the IEEE Author Center and individual IEEE technical societies. The author-side track requires disclosure of generative-AI use in preparing a manuscript, forbids listing an AI system as a co-author, and holds human authors fully accountable for the accuracy and originality of every word, figure, and citation regardless of how it was drafted. The reviewer-side track is a separate and stricter confidentiality rule: reviewers may not upload any part of a manuscript under review to a public generative-AI platform, and may not use such a platform to draft part or all of a review, because doing so risks exposing confidential, unpublished material to a system that can retain or learn from submitted input.
Nature Portfolio AI Policy
Nature Portfolio's AI policy is the set of editorial rules, published on nature.com and applied across Nature, its sister research and Nature Reviews journals, Scientific Reports, and other Nature Portfolio titles, governing generative AI use in submitted manuscripts. A submission is treated as compliant only if: (1) no AI tool (large language model, chatbot, or image generator) is listed as an author or co-author, since authorship requires accountability that a tool cannot hold; (2) any substantive use of an LLM or other generative AI tool in preparing the manuscript is disclosed in the Methods section (or an equivalent alternative section for article types without one) — minor AI-assisted copyediting of already-written text does not require disclosure; and (3) no AI-generated or AI-substantially-modified image, video, or figure is used, except in the narrow case of a piece specifically about AI itself, reviewed case-by-case by the editor, or artwork sourced through an agency with a contractual chain that makes its provenance legally clear.
Cambridge University Press Open Access Policy
Cambridge University Press's (CUP) approach to open access publishing centred on Read & Publish (R&P) agreements: multi-year deals negotiated with individual institutions or national/regional library consortia that bundle subscription reading access to Cambridge's journal portfolio (400+ titles) with open-access publishing rights for the institution's or consortium's corresponding authors, typically at no additional article processing charge (APC) to the author, or at a reduced/capped cost, up to a negotiated article quota. An author qualifies under a given agreement only if they are the corresponding author and are affiliated with a participating institution at the time of acceptance; the publishing platform identifies eligibility automatically at submission and offers the author an open-access route (usually CC BY) in place of, or alongside, the subscription/hybrid route.
Open Access Publishing Fund
An open access publishing fund is a dedicated pool of money, typically administered by a university library, that pays or reimburses Article Processing Charges (APCs) on behalf of researchers at that institution who have no other funding source available to cover them. Awards are usually capped per article and per researcher, contingent on the article having no other eligible funding, and available only until the fund’s annual allocation is exhausted — distinguishing it from institutional-level Read & Publish or transformative agreements, which cover OA publishing through a negotiated publisher license rather than an individually applied-for grant.
Reviewer Recognition Programs
A reviewer recognition program is a formal mechanism -- run by a publisher, a cross-publisher platform, or a professional society -- that creates a documented, and often verifiable and portable, record of a researcher's peer review activity. It exists because manuscript peer review is, by scholarly-publishing convention, unpaid, uncredited, confidential volunteer labor: an editor solicits a review, the reviewer submits comments, and outside the editor's own records nothing else normally happens. A reviewer recognition program is anything that closes that gap with a verifiable artifact -- a certificate, a platform-logged review history, or a portable credit entry -- that the reviewer can point to, as distinct from an informal 'thank you' with no lasting or checkable record.
IEEE Double-Blind Peer Review
IEEE's double-blind (also called double-anonymized) peer review is a submission-review model, adopted by specific IEEE journals, transactions, and conferences rather than applied IEEE-wide, in which the manuscript sent to reviewers has been stripped of author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, funding sources, and other directly identifying material, and reviewer identities are withheld from authors throughout review. A submission counts as following IEEE double-blind policy only if the venue itself has formally adopted the model (checkable in that publication's author guidelines) and the author has met its specific anonymization requirements at submission -- most IEEE publications instead use IEEE's default single-anonymized model, where the author's identity is visible to reviewers but not vice versa, so double-blind status is never assumed from the IEEE name alone.
SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding)
SERU (Shared Electronic Resource Understanding) is a NISO Recommended Practice (NISO RP-7-2012) that lets a subscribing library and a content provider (publisher, aggregator, or other vendor) forgo negotiating and signing a bespoke license agreement for an e-resource. Instead, both parties rely on a shared set of expectations grounded in existing copyright law and standard library/publisher practice, plus the model understanding set out in the RP-7-2012 document itself, which addresses the roles of the content provider, the subscribing institution, and authorized users; the scope of permitted and restricted use; privacy and confidentiality of usage data; online performance and service provision; and archiving/perpetual access. A given e-resource transaction counts as SERU-based when both the institution and the provider have indicated, typically by each being listed in NISO's SERU Registry, that they accept SERU's terms for that transaction in place of a signed license — at which point the order can be placed and access provisioned without a license ever being drafted, routed to counsel, or countersigned.
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) is a metadata model, in development through a NISO working group that began work in January 2024, for documenting the process and outcome of remediating a publication or other content resource for accessibility -- that is, altering an existing, inaccessible format (for example, a scanned PDF with no text layer, or an image-only textbook chapter) into a version usable with assistive technology, and recording what was done, to what standard, for whom, and where the resulting accessible file can be found or requested. ARM does not describe the accessibility of a resource as originally published; it describes remediation work performed after the fact -- who remediated it, which accessibility standard the remediated version targets (for example WCAG or an EPUB Accessibility conformance level), what format it is in, and how it can be discovered and reused so the same item is not remediated redundantly by multiple institutions. A resource is within ARM's scope if it involves an accessible alternative produced from a source resource, has metadata identifying the remediation process/outcome, and is intended to support discovery and/or deposit of that alternative in a shared repository.
NISO CREC (Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern)
<p><strong>NISO CREC</strong> refers to <strong>NISO RP-45-2024</strong>, the <em>Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern</em> Recommended Practice published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) on June 27, 2024 (DOI 10.3789/niso-rp-45-2024). CREC is not a new editorial rule about *when* something should be retracted — that judgment remains the domain of editorial-ethics guidance such as COPE's Retraction Guidelines. It is a communication standard about *how* a retraction, removal, or expression of concern (EoC), once decided, gets represented consistently in metadata and on-page display so that both human readers and machine systems (indexers, citation databases, reference managers, library discovery layers, aggregators) can detect and propagate the status automatically, rather than relying on someone noticing a notice.</p><p>A publisher, platform, or content system is applying CREC when it implements RP-45-2024's paired recommendations: (1) <strong>metadata</strong> — structured, machine-readable status elements attached to the item's record (classified in the Recommended Practice as Essential, Essential if Available, or Recommended), covering the original publication, the retraction/removal/EoC notice itself, dates, and reasons; and (2) <strong>display</strong> — visible, human-facing signals, including prepending “RETRACTED:” to the title, watermarking and labelling the content in both HTML and PDF renderings, and linking a distinct, easily located notice to the affected item rather than burying it in an unrelated editorial page.</p>
Journal Article Versions (JAV)
Journal Article Versions (JAV) is the NISO/ALPSP-defined controlled vocabulary (NISO RP-8-2008) for distinguishing the successive states a scholarly journal article passes through between first draft and final publication. A document instance is properly labelled with a JAV term — Author's Original (AO), Submitted Manuscript Under Review (SMUR), Accepted Manuscript (AM), Proof (P), Version of Record (VoR), Corrected Version of Record (CVoR), or Enhanced Version of Record (EVoR) — based on where it sits in the peer-review and publication workflow, not on its file format or where it happens to be hosted; the same PDF hosted in three different repositories is still one JAV stage, and two files with identical content but different peer-review status are different JAV stages.
NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach)
NISO MECA (Manuscript Exchange Common Approach), published as NISO Recommended Practice RP-30, is a technical protocol and package format specifying how manuscript files, associated metadata, and peer review history can be transferred automatically, in a machine-readable way, between different journals' and publishers' manuscript submission systems. A file transfer counts as MECA-compliant only if it (1) packages the manuscript files, metadata, and any transferred reviewer reports into the structured format the recommended practice defines, and (2) moves that package between systems through an automated, standardized transfer mechanism rather than a person manually re-uploading files and re-typing review comments into a second system.
COUNTER 5
COUNTER 5 (formally the COUNTER Code of Practice, Release 5, or 'COP5') is the current international standard governing how publishers, aggregators, and other content platforms must record and report usage statistics — searches, investigations, and requests — for the electronic resources (journals, databases, books, and multimedia items) they license to libraries and consortia. A usage report qualifies as 'COUNTER 5 compliant' only if it is produced from one of COP5's defined Master Report templates, uses COP5's controlled Metric_Types vocabulary, applies COP5's double-click and robot-filtering deduplication rules consistently, and (where automated) is retrievable via the COUNTER API (formerly called SUSHI, the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). The standard exists so that a usage number from one publisher platform means the same thing as the equivalent number from another, letting libraries compare cost-per-use and make collection-development and renewal decisions on a like-for-like basis.
Cascading Peer Review
Cascading peer review (also called portable or transferable peer review) is a manuscript-handling workflow in which a journal that rejects a submission -- typically for reasons of scope, fit, or relative significance rather than a fatal flaw in the work -- offers the author the option to transfer the manuscript, along with the completed reviewer reports and editorial decision letter, to another journal, most often a sister title within the same publisher's portfolio. The receiving journal's editor can then make a faster decision using the existing reviews (obtaining only a fresh check on any points the original reviewers flagged, or a brief update review) instead of restarting peer review from a blank slate. A workflow counts as cascading peer review only if three things are true: (1) a rejection or a 'suggest transfer' decision already occurred at the first journal, (2) the author has given informed consent for the manuscript and reviews to move, and (3) the receiving journal's editorial process actually reuses the transferred review material rather than treating the submission as brand-new. It is a portfolio-level triage mechanism, not a form of peer review in its own right -- the review methodology itself (single-anonymized, double-anonymized, open, etc.) is whatever the originating journal already used.
Hijacked journal
A journal is operating as a hijacked journal when a website solicits and accepts manuscripts, typically for a fee, under the name, ISSN, and/or editorial identity of a specific real, previously or currently legitimate journal, without authorization from that journal's actual publisher or editorial board. The operational test is genuine continuity with, or authorization from, the real publisher of record, checkable against the ISSN Portal, the journal's own site, or its listing in the index it claims.
Exclusive License (Publishing)
A publishing agreement in which the author keeps ownership of copyright but grants the publisher the sole, exclusive right to publish, reproduce, and distribute the work. It is offered by many journals as an alternative to a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA): under a CTA the author assigns copyright ownership itself to the publisher, whereas under an exclusive license the author retains ownership and grants only a defined bundle of exclusive rights, keeping whatever rights the agreement does not expressly grant away.
Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)
A compliance mechanism, developed by cOAlition S in 2020, under which a funded researcher asserts a CC BY (or CC BY-equivalent) licence over the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) at the point of submission -- typically via a standard statement in the cover letter, on the manuscript's first page, or in the acknowledgements -- rather than negotiating open-access rights with the publisher after acceptance. Because the author (via their funder's grant conditions) retained the necessary rights from the outset, the publisher's own copyright transfer agreement, embargo policy, or self-archiving terms cannot override the licence already applied. An instance qualifies as RRS only if the licence statement is made at submission, before any publisher agreement is signed; a rights claim asserted only after acceptance, or general institutional self-archiving without a prior funder-mandated statement, does not count.
Peer Review Fraud
The deliberate corruption of the manuscript peer-review process to obtain a favorable or falsely legitimate-looking editorial decision, via fabricated reviewer identities, reciprocal peer-review rings, or coercive demands unrelated to manuscript merit. Distinguished from good-faith reviewer error, ordinary editorial disagreement, or unconscious reviewer bias by the presence of deliberate intent to subvert the review process itself.
Frontiers Collaborative Peer Review
Frontiers Collaborative Peer Review is Frontiers Media's proprietary peer-review workflow in which reviewers and authors are put into direct, real-time dialogue -- typically through an online review forum -- to resolve concerns together, rather than exchanging one-way reports mediated entirely by an editor. A submission qualifies as having gone through this process if it moved through two distinct phases on Frontiers' platform: an independent review phase, where each reviewer prepares and submits a report without seeing the other reviewers' comments, followed by an interactive review phase, where the editor opens a shared online forum and authors, reviewers, and the handling editor can all read and respond to each other's comments directly until the reviewers are satisfied or a decision is reached. The reviewers' and handling editor's names are published alongside the final article, rather than kept anonymous indefinitely.
Open Peer Review
A peer review model in which review reports, reviewer identities, and/or post-publication comment threads are disclosed to readers rather than kept within a confidential editor-reviewer-author loop. A given implementation counts as open peer review to the extent it publishes review information (reports, decision letters, reviewer names) and/or enables open commenting - per the ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 peer review terminology framework - not merely because reviewer identity is known internally to the editor or author.
Co-Editor-in-Chief
A co-editor-in-chief structure exists when a journal names two or more individuals to jointly hold the editor-in-chief role, sharing final editorial authority over the journal (policy, contested decisions, ethics escalations) rather than one editor-in-chief delegating subordinate work to associate or section editors beneath a single top authority. Journals use this model to distribute workload, cover distinct subject-area or methodological expertise, manage a leadership transition, or reflect shared governance across co-publishing institutions. The title is applied inconsistently across publishers -- some co-editors-in-chief hold fully independent, co-equal sign-off authority; others function as a senior deputy to one lead editor-in-chief -- so a journal's own editorial policy or masthead documentation, not the title alone, determines actual decision authority.
Work Made for Hire
A work is a "work made for hire" under US copyright law (17 U.S.C. Section 101) when it falls into one of two categories: (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of their employment, or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use in one of nine specific categories (a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, or an atlas) where the parties expressly agree in a signed written instrument that the work is a work made for hire. Under 17 U.S.C. Section 201(b), the employer or commissioning party -- not the individual who actually created the work -- is treated in law as the "author" and default owner of the copyright, unless the parties have agreed otherwise in writing. This is distinct from a copyright assignment: an assignment transfers rights the creator originally held; work-made-for-hire status means the creator never held authorship or copyright in the work to begin with.
Heliyon’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Heliyon's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Heliyon, launched by Elsevier/Cell Press in 2015, is a broad-scope, open-access megajournal that peer-reviews submissions for technical and ethical soundness rather than for perceived novelty or likely impact, and explicitly welcomes negative/null results, incremental advances, and replication studies across essentially all scientific and medical disciplines. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report Heliyon's 2024 JCR data-year Impact Factor (2025 release) at approximately 4.3, up from a lower prior-year figure, alongside a separately computed 2024 CiteScore (Elsevier/Scopus) of approximately 4.2. CASRAI could not independently confirm either figure directly against Cell Press's own Heliyon journal page or jcr.clarivate.com at the time this entry was written -- Heliyon's official page returned an access error during verification. Treat both numbers as reported, not CASRAI-verified, and check Heliyon's own journal page or jcr.clarivate.com directly for the current, authoritative figure before citing one in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file.
Scientific Data (journal)
Scientific Data is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Springer Nature (Nature Portfolio), launched in 2014 specifically to publish formal, citable descriptions of research datasets. Its primary article type is the Data Descriptor -- not a conventional research article -- which combines a structured, machine-readable description of a dataset (methods, data-collection and processing steps, technical validation, and standardized metadata) with a narrative sufficient for another researcher to understand and reuse the data. A submission qualifies as a Data Descriptor, and is evaluated in peer review, on the technical soundness, completeness, and reusability of the dataset and its documentation -- not on the novelty, scientific impact, or hypothesis-driven conclusions that a traditional research article is judged on. The underlying data must be deposited in a recognized, community-endorsed public repository and made available under an open license; the Data Descriptor itself is the journal article that points to, documents, and formally credits that deposited dataset.
Environmental Science and Pollution Researchs Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
<p>The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of <em>Environmental Science and Pollution Research</em> (ESPR) is the Clarivate-calculated, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metric for this Springer (Springer Nature) journal, covering environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, and pollution-monitoring research. Per third-party JCR-tracking aggregators (Research.com, BioxBio, Resurchify) rather than a direct jcr.clarivate.com subscription check this session, ESPR's JIF rose through the early 2020s -- from roughly 2.6 in 2012 to about 5.8 for the 2022 JCR data year -- before falling to an aggregator-reported figure of approximately 5.59 for the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release), a decline these sources describe as consistent with a broader multi-year retrenchment across the journal's citation counts. As with any single aggregator-sourced figure, treat the exact decimal as indicative rather than authoritative until cross-checked against Clarivate's own JCR platform, and note that a journal's JIF is only ever one input into assessing where to submit or how to read a single paper's citation context -- not a substitute for reading the paper itself.</p>
PLOS Pathogens’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
PLOS Pathogens' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio PLOS Pathogens receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 release) of approximately 4.7-4.9 and a 2025 data-year figure (2026 release, issued June 2026) of approximately 4.9, with a five-year Impact Factor near 5.4, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 for microbiology -- but these are reported, not CASRAI-verified against PLOS's own page or jcr.clarivate.com directly, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. PLOS Pathogens is a selective, subject-specific PLOS title (launched September 2005) restricted to research on pathogens and host-pathogen interaction, distinct from both the broad-scope selective flagship PLOS Biology and the soundness-only multidisciplinary megajournal PLOS ONE -- which is important context because neither of those sibling titles' JIFs describes PLOS Pathogens, even though all three share a publisher and the same Clarivate methodology.
Self-Citation
Citing one's own previously published work (an article, dataset, preprint, or other output) within a new manuscript. Self-citation is legitimate, and often necessary, when it substantively supports the current work — building on prior results, pointing to a previously validated method instead of repeating it, or situating a study within a sustained research programme. It becomes problematic — citation manipulation rather than ordinary scholarly practice — when self-citations are added primarily to inflate personal or journal-level citation metrics rather than because the cited work is genuinely relevant, including reciprocal citation-stacking arrangements between authors or journals.
Nature Cancer’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Nature Cancer's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Nature Cancer journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to Nature Cancer's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Cancer's 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 14.3 for the JCR release covering 2024 data, with several aggregators reporting a further jump to approximately 28.0 for the most recent release (2025 data, released June 2026) -- an unusually large year-over-year increase worth treating cautiously. nature.com's own journal-information page could not be directly confirmed for this draft (login-gated), so treat these figures as reported rather than independently verified, and check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/natcancer before citing formally. Nature Cancer is a distinct, separately scored journal from Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and the other Nature Portfolio titles published by Springer Nature, and is also a separate journal from the similarly-named Nature Reviews Cancer. Per DORA and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in Nature Cancer or the merit of its authors.
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)
MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a Basel, Switzerland-headquartered academic publisher, founded in 1996, that publishes exclusively open access: every article it accepts is made freely readable on publication, funded by an author-side Article Processing Charge (APC) rather than reader subscriptions. MDPI operates several hundred peer-reviewed journals across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities -- examples include International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS), Sustainability, and Nutrients -- structured heavily around themed 'Special Issues' with guest editors, and is known for comparatively fast median times from submission to first editorial decision and to publication relative to many subscription journals. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA). It is a real, currently operating publisher, not a defunct or fictitious one -- but the label 'MDPI journal' does not, by itself, tell you the editorial rigor of any specific title, which varies journal by journal and has been the subject of genuine, documented scrutiny from indexing bodies and parts of the research community (see below).
Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is a nonprofit, member-based professional association -- not a standards body or an accrediting authority -- for people who work across the scholarly-publishing ecosystem. A person or organization qualifies as 'part of SSP' by joining as a member (individual or organizational), which in practice draws from publishers, librarians, technology and service vendors, researchers, and consultants working in scholarly communication. SSP's core activities are networking and professional development rather than standard-setting: an annual meeting held each spring, ongoing educational seminars and webinars, topical Focus Groups, and -- its best-known public-facing output -- The Scholarly Kitchen, an editorially independent blog SSP publishes on scholarly-communication trends, policy, and industry analysis.
The Lancet’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The Lancet's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the flagship Lancet journal (published by Elsevier since 1823, ISSN 0140-6736 print / 1474-547X online) receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. This term covers only the flagship Lancet title; the wider Lancet family (The Lancet Oncology, The Lancet Neurology, The Lancet Public Health, The Lancet Digital Health, and others) consists of separately edited, separately JCR-indexed journals each with its own distinct Impact Factor, not covered individually here. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators and Wikipedia's journal infobox report figures that diverge across releases and trackers -- roughly 88.5 attributed to the 2024 JCR data year and roughly 109.0 attributed to the 2025 data year have both been seen, inconsistently labeled -- and CASRAI has not independently reconciled these against a single primary source (jcr.clarivate.com is subscription-gated; thelancet.com's own journal-information page was not independently confirmed at the time of writing). Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or thelancet.com directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article The Lancet has published, nor of the researchers who authored it.
mBio’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
mBio's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the two-year citation ratio Clarivate calculates and publishes annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for mBio, the American Society for Microbiology's (ASM) broad-scope, gold open-access microbiology journal (ISSN 2150-7511, inaugural issue published 18 May 2010, founding Editor-in-Chief Arturo Casadevall). Because ASM does not publish the underlying JCR figure on the journal's own homepage, an instance of 'mBio's JIF' as used on this site means whichever figure the current JCR release actually reports for mBio, cross-checked across independent tracker sites rather than taken from a single aggregator, since third-party trackers do not always agree with each other or with the prior year's release in the interim before the next JCR update.
Cureus’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cureus's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- with one important current wrinkle: Cureus does not have an active JIF as of this writing. Cureus (ISSN 2168-8184), an open-access general medical journal owned by Springer Nature since December 2022, was placed 'on hold' by Clarivate in September 2024 and formally removed from the Web of Science Master Journal List in October 2025, following a period of substantial retraction activity and stated article-quality concerns. Removal from Web of Science means Cureus no longer accrues the citation counts a JIF is calculated from and does not receive a JCR figure for 2025 or any subsequent year. Before delisting, third-party JCR-tracking aggregators reported Cureus's most recent 2-year JIF variously as approximately 1.2 (attributed to the 2022 JCR release) and approximately 1.3 (attributed to a 2024 release), figures that do not fully agree with one another the way most stable, currently-indexed journals' aggregator figures do. Any impact-factor number for Cureus found online should be treated as historical, not current, and checked against Clarivate's live Master Journal List rather than cited as an active figure.
Journal of Neuroscience’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The Journal of Neuroscience's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio that JNeurosci -- the flagship weekly research journal of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) -- receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. The journal (ISSN 0270-6474 print, 1529-2401 online) has published continuously since 1981 and is indexed in Clarivate's Science Citation Index Expanded, which makes it JIF-eligible on the same mechanical basis as every other JCR-indexed title. Aggregator trackers (bioxbio.com, Wikipedia's infobox citing JCR) converge on a 2024 JIF of approximately 4.0, down from a reported peak near 6.7-6.9 in 2012-2013 -- a multi-year decline consistent with a broader pattern of JIF compression across many established neuroscience and biomedical titles as the denominator (citable items) and citation landscape have shifted. Treat any single figure as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or the journal's own page at jneurosci.org directly for the current, release-dated number before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article the Journal of Neuroscience has published, nor of the researchers who authored it.
Blood (ASH Journal)’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Blood's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio that Blood -- the flagship, weekly peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) -- receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. This entry is specifically about Blood the hematology journal (ISSN 0006-4971 print, 1528-0020 online), published continuously by ASH since 1946 -- not about the common noun 'blood' or any life-sciences journal with a similar-sounding title. Blood is indexed in Clarivate's Science Citation Index Expanded, which makes it JIF-eligible on the same mechanical basis as any other JCR-indexed title. Reported figures for Blood's current JIF diverge across sources: ASH's own hematology.org materials have cited a figure near 23.9, third-party JCR-tracking aggregators (BioxBio, JournalsInsights, journalmetrics.org) show figures in roughly the 20-24 range for recent releases, and one ASH-affiliated page referenced 21.0 tied to the 2023 JCR release. These differences most likely reflect different JCR release years and aggregator caching lag rather than disagreement about the underlying data -- the same pattern seen across most single-journal JIF pages. Treat any one number as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and confirm the current, release-dated figure directly against ashpublications.org/blood or jcr.clarivate.com before citing it formally.
PLOS Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
PLOS Biology's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio PLOS Biology receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 release) of approximately 5.5 and a 2025 data-year figure (2026 release, issued June 2026) in the roughly 6.9-7.2 range depending on tracker, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 (top 25%) for its category -- but these are reported, not CASRAI-verified against PLOS's own page or jcr.clarivate.com directly, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. Unlike its PLOS sibling title PLOS ONE, PLOS Biology is a selective flagship journal that peer-reviews for perceived significance and broad interest within biology alongside technical soundness, publishing a small fraction of what it receives -- which is important context because a selectively curated journal's citation profile is not directly comparable to a high-volume megajournal's, even when both carry a JIF from the same Clarivate methodology.
Neuron’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Neuron's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Cell Press neuroscience journal Neuron receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Neuron (ISSN 0896-6273 print, 1097-4199 online) is Cell Press's flagship neuroscience title, published continuously since 1988, and it is distinct from Cell and other Cell Press journals -- each carries its own separately computed JIF. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators (journalmetrics.org, bioxbio.com) and Wikipedia's infobox summary of JCR data converge on a 2-year JIF of approximately 15.0 for the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release), with a reported 5-year JIF near 16.6 (single-source, not independently cross-corroborated) and JCR Quartile 1 placement in neuroscience. Treat any single number cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or cell.com/metrics for the current, authoritative figure before citing it in a formal context. Per DORA and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
Cancer Discovery’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cancer Discovery's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the AACR journal Cancer Discovery receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Per journal-metrics tracker data reflecting the JCR release, Cancer Discovery's reported Impact Factor was approximately 29.5 for the 2025 JCR data year (Clarivate's June 2026 release), following a reported 33.3 for the 2024 data year and 29.7 for the 2023 data year -- Clarivate updates this figure every June, so treat any single number, including these, as time-stamped to a specific release rather than a fixed property of the journal. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
Cancer Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cancer Cell is a peer-reviewed oncology and cancer-biology journal published by Cell Press (an Elsevier imprint), first issued in 2002 (ISSN 1535-6108 print / 1878-3686 online). Its Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metric calculated as the mean number of citations, in the JCR year, to articles the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of citable items in that window. Per Clarivate's JCR (as reported via Wikipedia's sourced infobox and corroborated by independent JIF-aggregator sites), Cancer Cell's most recently released JIF is 56.1, based on 2025 citation data (2026 JCR release) -- up from a reported 44.5 for the 2024 data year (2025 release). Always confirm the current figure directly against Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (subscription-gated) or the publisher's own journal page before citing it in a CV, grant application, or promotion dossier, since JIF is recalculated annually and aggregator sites can lag or round the official release.
Current Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Current Biology's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the <a href='/dictionary/term/journal-citation-reports'>Journal Citation Reports (JCR)</a>. Current Biology is a Cell Press biweekly life-sciences journal (Cell Press became part of Elsevier in 1998/2001) launched in 1991 (ISSN 0960-9822), covering molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, neurobiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Its JIF is calculated and reported entirely independently of the JIF for Cell Press's founding flagship journal, <a href='/dictionary/term/cell-impact-factor'>Cell</a>, even though both share the Cell Press imprint. See the general <a href='/dictionary/term/journal-impact-factor'>Journal Impact Factor</a> entry for how the metric is defined and its well-documented limitations as a research-assessment tool.
Frontiers in Immunology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Frontiers in Immunology's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual Clarivate Journal Citation Reports metric for this Frontiers Media open-access immunology journal, currently reported by the publisher's own journal page as 7.0 for the 2025 JCR data year (June 2026 release), up from 5.9 for the 2024 data year -- a title whose reported JIF has moved unusually widely release to release, so the current figure should be confirmed directly against Clarivate before formal citation.
Advanced Materials’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Advanced Materials' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual two-year citation metric Clarivate publishes for the journal in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): citations in a given JCR year to Advanced Materials articles published in the preceding two years, divided by the number of citable items Advanced Materials published in those two years. Advanced Materials is a materials-science journal published by Wiley-VCH since 1989 (independent from an earlier Angewandte Chemie supplement dating to 1988; ISSN 0935-9648 print, 1521-4095 online); its reported JIF was 26.8 for the 2024 JCR data year per Wikipedia's JCR-sourced infobox.
Title Page (Research Paper)
<p>A <strong>title page</strong> is the first page of an academic manuscript that identifies the work and its authors before the reader reaches the abstract or main text. What makes a page function as a title page — as opposed to just a cover sheet — is that it carries a defined, checkable set of identifying elements: at minimum the full title, the author byline, and institutional affiliation. Beyond that minimum, exactly which additional elements are required, and where each one goes, is set by whichever style guide or journal the manuscript is being formatted for — not by a single universal template. A style manual such as APA's 7th edition and an individual journal's author guidelines can require different elements in different positions, and where they conflict, the target journal's own instructions take precedence over the general style guide.</p>
I.e. vs. E.g.
"I.e." (Latin id est, "that is") restates or clarifies the statement it follows with an exhaustive equivalent, while "e.g." (Latin exempli gratia, "for example") introduces one or more illustrative, non-exhaustive examples. The operational test: if you can replace the abbreviation with "that is" or "in other words" without changing the sentence's meaning, "i.e." is correct; if the material that follows is one option among others rather than a full restatement, "e.g." is correct. In academic writing, misuse of either changes what the sentence actually claims -- writing "i.e." before a partial list implies it is complete when it isn't, and writing "e.g." before a defining criterion understates that the criterion is required.
Figure Legend
A figure legend (also called a figure caption) is the block of text accompanying a figure -- typically placed directly beneath it, or grouped on a separate legends page/section depending on the target journal's submission format -- that must let a reader understand the figure entirely on its own, without needing to reread the Methods or Results text. To meet that standalone-comprehension bar, a complete figure legend generally includes: a short declarative title sentence stating the figure's main point or finding; a description of what each panel shows (for multi-panel figures, keyed to the panel letters used in the image); definitions of every abbreviation, symbol, and color/line code used in the figure; the statistical test applied and what error bars or shaded regions represent (e.g., SD, SEM, 95% CI); and the relevant sample size (n). A figure legend is distinct from an in-text figure reference or callout (e.g., 'as shown in Figure 2', 'see Fig. 3B'), which is a pointer embedded in the manuscript's running prose directing the reader to look at the figure -- the legend is the self-contained explanatory text that travels with the figure itself.
Retraction Statement
The formal notice a journal or publisher issues to retract a published article — a standalone document, not the article itself, that identifies the article, states who initiated the retraction and why, and is bidirectionally linked to the retracted paper. A publication counts as a retraction statement only when the journal publishes it under its own editorial authority and explicitly labels it as a retraction, distinct from a correction, erratum, or expression of concern.
AI and Ethics’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
AI and Ethics' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Springer Nature journal AI and Ethics receives in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) once it is JCR-indexed and citation-eligible -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. AI and Ethics (ISSN 2730-5953 print, 2730-5961 online) launched in 2021 and publishes on the ethical, regulatory, and policy implications of artificial intelligence, a comparatively young and fast-growing field for a dedicated journal. Third-party tracking sites report differing figures for the journal depending on the metric and window used -- for example, exaly.com reports a 2024 figure of roughly 6.1 alongside a separately labeled '2-year impact' figure of roughly 3.68 for the same year, which do not match each other and may not both be Clarivate JCR figures specifically (aggregators sometimes report Scopus/CiteScore-style metrics under an 'impact factor' label). CASRAI could not independently confirm a single authoritative JCR figure against jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or link.springer.com/journal/43681 (login-walled at the time of writing). Given the journal's 2021 launch, confirm directly with jcr.clarivate.com or the journal's own Springer page whether AI and Ethics is currently JCR-indexed at all, and if so for which data year, before citing any specific number formally.
JAMA Network Open’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
JAMA Network Open's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. It is a separate, independently computed figure from the flagship JAMA journal's own JIF, and the two should never be quoted interchangeably. Third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 JCR release) of approximately 10.5 and a 2025 data-year figure (2026 JCR release, issued June 2026) of approximately 11.7, with the journal placed in JCR Quartile 1 -- but these are reported, not CASRAI-verified directly against jamanetworkopen.com or jcr.clarivate.com, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. JAMA Network Open launched in 2018 as an open-access, general-medicine title within the JAMA Network family published by the American Medical Association (AMA); unlike the subscription-model flagship JAMA, it publishes open access across all areas of medicine rather than a curated weekly selection, which shapes how its citation volume accumulates relative to JAMA's.
International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) Impact Factor (JIF)
The Impact Factor (JIF) of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS) is the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metric Clarivate publishes for this MDPI-owned title, calculated as the average number of 2026 citations to articles IJMS published in 2024-2025, divided by the number of citable items it published in those two years. As of the most recent JCR release (June 2026, covering 2025 citation data), third-party trackers that mirror Clarivate's JCR figures report a 2-year Impact Factor of approximately 5.6 and a 5-year Impact Factor of approximately 6.3, placing IJMS in JCR Quartile 1 (Q1) of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology category. CASRAI did not independently fetch jcr.clarivate.com for this figure (subscription-gated); treat the number as REPORTED-tier, cross-corroborated across multiple independent JCR-tracking sites rather than confirmed directly against Clarivate's own portal, and re-verify before citing it in a high-stakes context such as a promotion or tenure file.
Molecular Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Molecular Cell's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general <a href='/dictionary/term/journal-impact-factor'>Journal Impact Factor</a> metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Molecular Cell (ISSN 1097-2765) is a Cell Press life-sciences research journal founded in 1997/1998, editorially and commercially distinct from both Cell Press's flagship title <a href='/dictionary/term/cell-impact-factor'>Cell</a> and its open-access sister journal <a href='/dictionary/term/cell-reports-impact-factor'>Cell Reports</a> — each carries its own, separately computed JIF despite the shared Cell Press imprint.
Journal of Biological Chemistry’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The Journal of Biological Chemistry's (JBC) Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio JBC receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. JBC (ISSN 0021-9258, e-ISSN 1083-351X) is published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and has been in continuous publication since 1905, making it one of the longest-running biochemistry journals still active; it converted to a fully open-access model in 2021. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report JBC's 2-year JIF at roughly 4.1 for the 2025 JCR data year (released June 2026), up from roughly 3.76 for the 2024 data year, with a reported 5-year JIF near 4.3 and a JCR Quartile 2 placement in biochemistry and molecular biology. These aggregator figures do not always agree with one another, and ASBMB's own jbc.org site was not independently reachable to confirm one authoritative figure at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or jbc.org directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
Nucleic Acids Research’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Nucleic Acids Research's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual two-year citation metric Clarivate publishes for the journal in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): citations in a given JCR year to Nucleic Acids Research articles published in the preceding two years, divided by the number of citable items the journal published in those two years. Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) is an open-access, biweekly molecular biology and biochemistry journal published by Oxford University Press since 1974 (ISSN 0305-1048 print, 1362-4962 online). Its reported JIF has sat in the low-to-mid-teens across recent JCR releases; Wikipedia's infobox (sourced to JCR) lists 15.0 for the release covering 2024 citation data, though other secondary summaries have reported a lower figure near 13.1 for what is nominally the same data year -- a cross-tracker discrepancy CASRAI has not independently resolved against a live jcr.clarivate.com subscription this session.
JCI Insight’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
JCI Insight's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual Clarivate-calculated citation ratio published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for JCI Insight specifically. JCI Insight is a separate journal from the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI): it is the gold open-access companion title the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) launched in 2016 (ISSN 2379-3708), separately indexed in the JCR with its own figure, whereas "JCI" on its own means ASCI's flagship Journal of Clinical Investigation (ISSN 0021-9738 print / 1558-8238 online), which CASRAI covers on a separate page. JCI Insight's own journal-information page (insight.jci.org/kiosks/about) states an Impact Factor of 6.8 for the 2025 JCR data year, verified 7 August 2026; Clarivate updates the JCR every June, so treat that number as current only as of that release and confirm it before citing it in a CV, tenure file, or funder report. No figure on the JCI Insight page applies to the Journal of Clinical Investigation, or vice versa.
New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The New England Journal of Medicine's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Massachusetts Medical Society's flagship clinical-medicine journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. NEJM (ISSN 0028-4793 print, 1533-4406 online) has published continuously since 1812, making it one of the oldest continuously published medical journals in the world, and is indexed in Clarivate's Science Citation Index Expanded, which makes it JIF-eligible. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report NEJM's 2-year JIF in the high-70s to mid-80s range for recent releases -- figures cited include roughly 78.5 and roughly 84.5 for figures described as the '2025 impact factor,' attributed inconsistently to the 2025 versus 2026 JCR release across different aggregator pages -- with a reported 5-year JIF near 84.9. These aggregator figures do not agree with one another even when describing what appears to be the same release, and NEJM's own journal-information page was not independently reachable to confirm one authoritative figure at the time of writing (returned an access-restricted response during verification). Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or nejm.org directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article NEJM has published, nor of the researchers who authored it.
NEJM AI
NEJM AI is a peer-reviewed monthly journal published by NEJM Group (a division of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the same publisher as the flagship New England Journal of Medicine) that publishes original research, reviews, perspectives, and policy analysis on the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to medicine and health care. It launched in December 2023, with its inaugural issue in January 2024. NEJM AI is editorially and operationally distinct from NEJM itself: it has its own submission portal (ai.nejm.org), its own editorial board and peer-review process, and a narrower topical scope than the flagship journal's general internal medicine remit. A manuscript is within NEJM AI's scope if its central contribution is an AI/ML method, dataset, or system applied to a biomedical or clinical problem, or an analysis of AI's technical, regulatory, ethical, or health-system implications — not simply a clinical study that happens to use software.
Cell Reports Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cell Reports Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio this journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) — citations in the JCR data year to the journal’s citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Cell Reports Medicine is a Cell Press open-access journal, launched in 2020, publishing translational and clinical biomedical research — distinct from its broader-scope sister title Cell Reports, which covers life sciences generally and carries its own separate JIF. Multiple third-party JCR-tracking aggregators converge on a figure of approximately 14.0 for the 2025 JCR data year (Clarivate’s June 2026 release), placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1, but CASRAI was not able to independently confirm this against jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or reach Cell Press’s own metrics page directly at the time of writing, so treat this as a cross-corroborated but secondary-source figure rather than a primary-verified one. Clarivate updates JCR every June; check jcr.clarivate.com or cell.com/cell-reports-medicine for the current, release-dated figure before citing a number in a formal context. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
ACS Nano’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
ACS Nano's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual two-year citation metric Clarivate publishes for the journal in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): citations in a given JCR year to ACS Nano articles published in the preceding two years, divided by the number of citable items ACS Nano published in those two years. ACS Nano is a nanoscience and nanotechnology journal published by the American Chemical Society since 2007 (ISSN 1936-0851 print, 1936-086X online); its reported JIF has sat in the mid-to-high-teens range across recent JCR releases (approximately 16.0 for the 2024 data year per secondary trackers, up from a reported 15.8 for 2023).
Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Nature Medicine's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Nature Medicine journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to Nature Medicine's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Multiple independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Medicine's 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 79.6 for the most recent JCR release, down from a pandemic-era peak of roughly 87.2; nature.com's own journal-information page could not be directly confirmed for this draft (login-gated), so treat the figure as reported rather than independently verified, and check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/nm for the current number before citing it formally. Nature Medicine is a distinct, separately scored journal from Nature, Nature Communications, and the other 60-plus Nature Portfolio titles published by Springer Nature -- a JIF reported for a sister journal is never Nature Medicine's own figure. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in Nature Medicine or the merit of its authors.
Science Translational Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Science Translational Medicine's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Third-party JCR-tracking sources and journal-affiliated summaries report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 JCR release) of approximately 14.6, though at least one independent aggregator lists a close but distinct figure near 13.6 for the same data year -- these are reported, not CASRAI-verified directly against jcr.clarivate.com, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in Science Translational Medicine or the merit of its authors.
Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Communications Biology's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Springer Nature journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Communications Biology (ISSN 2399-3642) is a Nature Portfolio, fully open-access, broad-scope biology journal launched in 2018, and it is a distinct title from Nature Communications despite the similar name -- each carries its own separately computed JIF, and the two should never be cited interchangeably. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report Communications Biology's 2-year JIF at approximately 5.1 for the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release) and approximately 5.8 for the 2025 JCR data year (2026 release, issued June 2026), placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 within its category. CASRAI could not independently confirm either figure directly against Nature Portfolio's own journal-impact page (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact), which sits behind an account-gated redirect, or against jcr.clarivate.com directly, at the time this entry was written -- treat both numbers as reported, not CASRAI-verified, and check the journal's own metrics page or jcr.clarivate.com for the current, release-dated figure before citing one in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
Journal of Clinical Investigation’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI)'s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is that specific journal's own annual Clarivate metric -- citations in a given year to the articles and reviews it published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items -- published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). It is a single journal's instance of the general JIF metric, not a separate calculation method, and it changes with every annual JCR release (Clarivate updates JCR every June). "JCI" on its own refers to this journal, The Journal of Clinical Investigation (ISSN 0021-9738 print / 1558-8238 online). It is a separate journal from JCI Insight, ASCI's gold open-access companion title launched in 2016 (ISSN 2379-3708), which is separately indexed in the JCR and carries its own, different figure -- see CASRAI's JCI Insight entry, and never substitute one journal's number for the other's. Per the journal's own information page (jci.org/kiosks/about), verified 7 August 2026, JCI's Impact Factor is 14.3 for the 2025 JCR data year.
Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cell's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the flagship Cell Press journal Cell receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Cell (ISSN 0092-8674) is Cell Press's founding, subscription/hybrid flagship life-sciences journal, published continuously since 1974, and it is distinct from Cell Reports, Cell Press's open-access sister journal launched in 2012 -- each carries its own separately computed JIF. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report Cell's 2-year JIF in the low-to-mid 40s (figures cited include roughly 42.5 for the 2024 JCR data year and roughly 45.1 for the 2025 JCR data year), with a reported 5-year JIF near 48.9 and JCR Quartile 1 placement in cell biology, but these aggregator figures diverge from one another and Cell Press's own metrics page was not independently reachable to confirm one authoritative figure at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or cell.com/metrics for the current, authoritative figure before citing it in a formal context. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
PLOS ONE's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio PLOS ONE receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 release) of approximately 2.6 and a 2025 data-year figure (2026 release, issued June 2026) of approximately 2.8, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 2 for Multidisciplinary Sciences -- but these are reported, not CASRAI-verified against PLOS's own page or jcr.clarivate.com directly, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. PLOS ONE is also a megajournal that peer-reviews for scientific and methodological soundness rather than perceived novelty or impact, which is important context: because acceptance does not turn on subjective significance, a single journal-level average citation figure describes an unusually broad and heterogeneous body of published work even more than it does for a conventionally curated journal. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in PLOS ONE or the merit of its authors.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a free, publicly available journal-prestige indicator produced by the SCImago Research Group (a joint initiative of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and the University of Granada, Spain) and published via scimagojr.com, using citation data licensed from Elsevier's Scopus database. A journal's SJR score is not a simple citation count or average -- it is computed with an iterative, PageRank-style algorithm that redistributes 'prestige' across the citation network so that a citation from a higher-prestige journal counts for more than a citation from a lower-prestige one. The calculation uses a 3-year citation window (citations received in year Y to documents published in years Y-1, Y-2, and Y-3), and caps journal self-citation at a maximum of 33% of a journal's total outgoing references so a journal cannot inflate its own score by citing itself. SCImago also publishes each journal's placement into quartiles (Q1-Q4) within its Scopus subject category, which is what most researchers use day to day to gauge a journal's relative standing among its direct peers.
Cell Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Cell Reports' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio Cell Reports receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Cell Reports is a Cell Press (Elsevier) open-access, broad-scope life-sciences journal, and its JIF has placed it in JCR Quartile 1 for Cell Biology in recent releases; third-party JCR-tracking services report figures in roughly the high-6-to-8 range across the last several JCR releases, but they do not agree on an exact current figure, and Cell Press's own site was not independently reachable to confirm one at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or the journal's own metrics page at cell.com/cell-reports for the current, authoritative figure before citing it in a formal context. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.
iThenticate
iThenticate is a text-matching (similarity-checking) service, owned and operated by Turnitin, that is marketed to publishers, journal editorial offices, funding agencies, and research institutions rather than to classroom instructors. A document qualifies as having been "run through iThenticate" when it has been submitted to the service's own web interface or via an API/editorial-management integration, compared against iThenticate's reference corpus (current and archived web content, previously submitted documents, and licensed academic publications, journals, and periodicals), and returned as a similarity report with a percentage-based similarity index and a source-by-source match breakdown. iThenticate is the same underlying detection engine Turnitin uses for its education product, packaged and licensed separately for non-classroom, professional research contexts: manuscript submission, grant proposal screening, and pre-publication or pre-submission self-checks. Crossref Similarity Check is a related but distinct service that Crossref operates on top of the iThenticate engine for its member publishers; a document checked through Crossref Similarity Check is, technically, still being matched by iThenticate's underlying engine, just accessed through Crossref's integration rather than a direct iThenticate license.
Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Science Advances' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio Science Advances receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2024 data-year figure (2025 release) of roughly 12.1-12.5 and a 2025 data-year figure (2026 release) of approximately 13.9, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 for Multidisciplinary Sciences -- but these are reported, not CASRAI-verified against AAAS's own page or jcr.clarivate.com directly, and should be confirmed there before formal citation. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in Science Advances or the merit of its authors.
Active Voice vs. Passive Voice
In scientific and academic writing, active voice makes the sentence's grammatical subject the agent performing the action ('We measured the samples'), while passive voice makes the subject the recipient of the action, with the agent optional or omitted ('The samples were measured'). Neither is a grammar error — the choice is stylistic and governed by disciplinary convention. Current guidance (APA Style; the author instructions of most high-impact journals, including Nature- and Science-family titles) treats active voice as the default for clarity throughout most of a manuscript, while passive voice remains the traditional — and often still preferred — register in Methods sections, where the procedure is the focus rather than who performed it.
Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Nature's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the flagship Nature journal receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to Nature's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Multiple independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature's 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 56.1 for the most recent JCR release (2025 citation data, released June 2026), up from approximately 48.5 the prior release; nature.com's own journal-information page could not be directly confirmed for this draft (login-gated), so treat the figure as reported rather than independently verified, and check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com for the current number before citing it formally. Nature is a distinct, separately scored journal from Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, and the other 60-plus Nature Portfolio titles published by Springer Nature -- a JIF reported for a sister journal is never Nature's own figure. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in Nature or the merit of its authors.
Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Scientific Reports' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio Scientific Reports receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Multiple independent JCR-tracking services report the 2-year Impact Factor rose to approximately 4.9 in the most recent JCR release (2025 citation data, released June 2026), up from approximately 3.9 the prior release; this figure was not independently confirmed against Nature Portfolio's own metrics page for this draft, so treat it as reported rather than verified, and check the journal's own page or jcr.clarivate.com before citing it formally. Scientific Reports is a large, open-access, multidisciplinary Nature Portfolio journal that accepts submissions on technical soundness rather than perceived novelty, so per DORA and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in it.
APA Authorship Guidelines
APA authorship guidelines are the authorship-determination rules set out in Standard 8.12 ("Publication Credit") of the American Psychological Association's Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. They govern two separate questions: who qualifies as an author at all (Standard 8.12a: only someone who has actually performed the work or substantially contributed to it — formulating the problem or hypothesis, structuring the experimental design, conducting the statistical analysis, or interpreting the results), and how author order and credit should be assigned once the author list is settled (Standard 8.12b: order must accurately reflect each person's relative scientific or professional contribution, never institutional rank or seniority alone). A separate provision, Standard 8.12c, addresses student work specifically: except in exceptional circumstances, a student is listed as principal (first) author on any multi-authored article substantially based on that student's doctoral dissertation. The guidelines apply within the ethical code psychologists are bound by professionally — they are not a citation-formatting rule, and are distinct from the APA Publication Manual's separate reference-list and in-text citation conventions.
PLOS ONE Author Contributions Statement
A PLOS ONE author contributions statement is the mandatory, structured disclosure every PLOS ONE submission must include, attributing specific tasks in the reported work to each named author individually. It is required at online submission, is separate from PLOS's authorship-eligibility criteria (adapted from McNutt et al. 2018 rather than the ICMJE four-point test) and from the acknowledgments section (which credits non-author helpers, not listed authors), and is published alongside the final article. Since PLOS's 2016 taxonomy switch, the statement is built from the 14-role CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy, now ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022) vocabulary. Before that, from PLOS ONE's 2006 launch through 2016, the same requirement existed but used PLOS's own five-category list: Conceived and designed the experiments; Performed the experiments; Analyzed the data; Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools; Wrote the paper.
Bibliography
A bibliography is a systematic list of the sources an author consulted or judged relevant while researching a work, presented in a standardized citation format and arranged for reader verification. It is distinct from a reference list or works-cited list, which (under APA and MLA convention) includes only sources actually cited in the text; a bibliography, particularly under the Chicago notes-bibliography system, can additionally include background sources the author consulted but never directly cited. This broader scope is why the bibliography sense persists in literature reviews, monographs, annotated-bibliography assignments, and grant or manuscript submissions that ask authors to document the literature surveyed, not just the literature quoted.
arXiv Endorsement System
The arXiv endorsement system is the mechanism arXiv uses to confirm that a first-time submitter, or an existing author submitting to an arXiv subject category for the first time, is a legitimate participant in that field before their submission is accepted for processing. A submission is subject to endorsement whenever the submitting author has no prior accepted-and-announced papers in the specific endorsement domain they are submitting to. To satisfy the requirement, the author must be endorsed by an existing arXiv author (an 'endorser') who is themselves in good standing in that same endorsement domain, meaning the endorser has authored a sufficient number of papers in that domain within roughly the preceding five years (and at least three months old, so very recent authors cannot immediately endorse others). Endorsement confirms only that the submission is topically appropriate for the category and that the author appears to understand the field's basic conventions -- arXiv is explicit that endorsement 'is not peer review' and endorsers are not vouching for scientific correctness. Endorsement is separate from arXiv moderation, the ongoing process by which category moderators can reclassify, hold, or (rarely) reject content after submission on subject-matter or scope grounds.
ONIX (ONline Information eXchange)
An XML-based family of metadata standards, maintained internationally by EDItEUR (with regional groups Book Industry Communication/BIC in the UK and BISG in the US), used to exchange structured product and rights information across the publishing supply chain. A metadata record qualifies as ONIX when it validates against one of EDItEUR's published ONIX XML schemas/DTDs (the current major version for book-trade metadata is ONIX for Books 3.0, extended by 3.1) and carries the standard's defined composite structure, code lists, and identifiers rather than a proprietary or free-text feed.
Link Resolver
A link resolver is OpenURL-based library-discovery software that accepts a context-sensitive citation link (from a database, discovery layer, or search engine), checks it against the library's knowledge base of current subscriptions and open-access holdings, and, if a match exists, routes the user to the specific full-text copy that institution has legitimate access to -- rather than to a fixed, publisher-assigned location. It is the software behind a library's "Find It", "Get It", or "Get Full Text" button.
Cabells Predatory Reports
Cabells Predatory Reports (formerly Cabells' Blacklist, renamed in June 2020) is a commercial subscription database, published by the scholarly-analytics company Cabells, that lists journals its review team has determined exhibit deceptive or predatory editorial and publishing practices. A journal's inclusion is determined by evaluating it against a published, versioned set of behavioral indicators — v1.0 (2017) contained 64 criteria and v1.1 (2019) expanded to 74, organized by category (integrity, peer review, business practices, indexing claims, and similar) and by severity — rather than by a single reviewer's informal judgment. Unlike Beall's List, which is a static snapshot frozen in January 2017, Predatory Reports is actively maintained: journals are added, and the underlying criteria themselves have been revised, on an ongoing basis. Access is by paid subscription, typically arranged at the institutional level through a university library, either as a standalone product or bundled with Cabells' companion Journalytics subscription.
Good Publication Practice (GPP)
Good Publication Practice (GPP) is a named, industry-authored set of ethics guidelines for planning, writing, and publishing company-sponsored biomedical research -- primarily pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical-device studies. It is maintained by a GPP Steering Committee working with ISMPP (the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals) and published as a peer-reviewed article in Annals of Internal Medicine. The current version is GPP 2022, which superseded GPP3 (2015); GPP3 itself superseded the original GPP2 (2009) and GPP (2003). A study, manuscript, or publication process is GPP-compliant when: authorship is assigned strictly against ICMJE's four authorship criteria (not honorary, guest, or ghost authorship); the funding source and the sponsor's role in study design, analysis, and the decision to publish are disclosed; any professional medical writer's involvement is named and their support disclosed, typically in the acknowledgements; named authors have full access to the data (or a summary sufficient to vouch for it) and control over interpretation and the final decision to publish; and there is a documented intent to publish results regardless of outcome, including negative or inconclusive findings.
Editorial Independence
Editorial independence is the principle, formalized by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), that a journal's editorial decisions -- to accept, reject, or request revision of a manuscript -- are made solely on scholarly merit and are insulated from influence by the journal's owner, publisher, advertisers, sponsors, or any other commercial or non-scientific interest. It requires that editors hold final, unoverridable authority over content decisions, that advertising/sponsorship functions operate organizationally separate from editorial functions, and that any relationship between the journal and a commercial or sponsoring party is governed by a declared, public policy rather than an informal arrangement.
Horizon Europe Article 39 (Open Access)
Article 39 of Regulation (EU) 2021/695, the Horizon Europe framework regulation, is the legal provision that creates the programme's binding open science obligations for grant beneficiaries. It has two strands: (1) mandatory immediate open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting from Horizon Europe funding, with no embargo period, licensed under the latest version of Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or an equivalent licence (a narrower exception permits CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND for monographs and other long-form outputs); and (2) responsible management of research data under the FAIR principles and the default that data should be 'as open as possible, as closed as necessary,' subject to documented, justified exceptions for IP, personal data, confidentiality, or security. Horizon Europe Grant Agreements incorporate both strands as binding funding conditions, not discretionary guidance.
Scholarly Literature
Scholarly literature is the body of research output produced by subject-matter experts, evaluated through a formal quality-control process (typically peer review or editorial vetting by a scholarly body), and published with the primary purpose of advancing a field's knowledge base rather than generating commercial revenue or informing a general audience. A work qualifies as scholarly literature when it satisfies three conditions together: (1) authorship by researchers writing within their area of expertise, usually with an institutional or disciplinary affiliation; (2) formal vetting before or as a condition of publication -- peer review for journal articles, editorial/academic-board review for monographs, programme-committee review for conference proceedings, or committee examination for dissertations and theses; and (3) a citation apparatus (references, methods, data availability) that lets other researchers verify, build on, or reproduce the work. The main forms are peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly monographs, conference proceedings, and dissertations/theses; preprints and working papers are usually treated as scholarly literature in a provisional, not-yet-vetted form pending peer review.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is Clarivate's annual analytics database and publication reporting citation-based metrics — including the Journal Impact Factor, Journal Citation Indicator, Eigenfactor Score, Article Influence Score, and quartile (Q1-Q4) category rankings — for journals in the Web of Science Core Collection. A figure counts as "the JCR number" only when it is what Clarivate itself calculates and publishes in a specific annual release (e.g. JCR 2026), sourced from Web of Science citation data — not a similar-looking figure mirrored by a third-party site or a metric from a different database such as Scopus.
