Sub-Saharan Africa's Biomedical Journal Coverage in Scholarly Databases: A comparison of Web of Science, Scopus, EMBASE, PubMed, African Index Medicus and AfricanJournals Online

<p>Data is freely available online doi: 10.17632/52pncd8zmy.1</p>

Sub-Saharan Africa's Biomedical Journal Coverage in Scholarly Databases: A comparison of Web of Science, Scopus, EMBASE, PubMed, African Index Medicus and AfricanJournals Online

<p>Data is freely available online doi: 10.17632/52pncd8zmy.1</p>

PubMed Central as a platform for the survival of open-access biomedical society journals published in Korea

Twenty-one years have passed since PubMed Central (PMC) launched. The present case study describes Korean editors’ history of participation in PMC and their contributions to PMC. The three main turning points in the history of Korean editors’ involvement with PMC were as follows: first, the production of PMC XML files and deposition starting in 2008; second, thorough evaluations of applying journals since 2014; and third, the feasibility of non-English journals being indexed in PMC starting in 2019. The importance of PMC is further shown by the fact that KoreaMed Synapse, a full-text XML database of biomedical journals in Korea that was launched in 2007, was created by benchmarking PMC. Scholarly societies or institutes publish 724 (34.2%) of the 2,119 PMC journals without embargo in June 2021. Out of those 724 journals, 127 (17.5%) are published in Korea. PMC has helped local journals receive more citations from researchers worldwide, increasing their likelihood of being indexed in international databases. The number of submissions from international researchers has increased, thereby making it possible for journals to achieve international diversity. As the best full-text platform of biomedical journals, PMC has provided an excellent opportunity for biomedical journal editors in Korea to change their journals’ language to English and produce full-text JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) XML files. These factors have made Korea the second-ranked country in terms of no-embargo PMC journals published by academic societies or institutes.

ECO-CollecTF: A Corpus of Annotated Evidence-Based Assertions in Biomedical Manuscripts

Analysis of high-throughput experiments in the life sciences frequently relies upon standardized information about genes, gene products, and other biological entities. To provide this information, expert curators are increasingly relying on text mining tools to identify, extract and harmonize statements from biomedical journal articles that discuss findings of interest. For determining reliability of the statements, curators need the evidence used by the authors to support their assertions. It is important to annotate the evidence directly used by authors to qualify their findings rather than simply annotating mentions of experimental methods without the context of what findings they support. Text mining tools require tuning and adaptation to achieve accurate performance. Many annotated corpora exist to enable developing and tuning text mining tools; however, none currently provides annotations of evidence based on the extensive and widely used Evidence and Conclusion Ontology. We present the ECO-CollecTF corpus, a novel, freely available, biomedical corpus of 84 documents that captures high-quality, evidence-based statements annotated with the Evidence and Conclusion Ontology.

A scoping review on biomedical journal peer review guides for reviewers

Background Peer review is widely used in academic fields to assess a manuscript’s significance and to improve its quality for publication. This scoping review will assess existing peer review guidelines and/or checklists intended for reviewers of biomedical journals and provide an overview on the review guidelines. Methods PubMed, Embase, and Allied and Complementary Medicine (AMED) databases were searched for review guidelines from the date of inception until February 19, 2021. There was no date restriction nor article type restriction. In addition to the database search, websites of journal publishers and non-publishers were additionally hand-searched. Results Of 14,633 database publication records and 24 website records, 65 publications and 14 websites met inclusion criteria for the review (78 records in total). From the included records, a total of 1,811 checklist items were identified. The items related to Methods, Results, and Discussion were found to be the highly discussed in reviewer guidelines. Conclusion This review identified existing literature on peer review guidelines and provided an overview of the current state of peer review guides. Review guidelines were varying by journals and publishers. This calls for more research to determine the need to use uniform review standards for transparent and standardized peer review. Protocol registration The protocol for this study has been registered at Research Registry (www.researchregistry.com): reviewregistry881.

International Journal of Epidemiology peer reviewers: global and gender distribution

The science of epidemiology studies and analyses the patterns, distributions and determinants of health-related entities. Peer review is crucial to the biomedical journal ecosystem. Furthermore, gender inequality persists in science and improving gender representation is a key international goal. For these reasons, we evaluated the geographical location and gender distribution of the International Journal of Epidemiology peer reviewers for 2018. There were 695 peer reviewers hailing from 41 countries. 77% (533) of the reviewers were from 20% (8) of these countries, a classical 80:20 Pareto distrubution. 41% (282) of peer reviewers were female. Although in line with the general underrepresentation of females reported in the literature, this proportion was much closer to parity than in other fields. Our investigation of peer reviewer 'epidemiology' demonstrates geographical and gender inequalities that can be further improved since diversity promotes innovation and a greater possibility for solving complex problems.