Find a home for your research paper, authors, related papers – ask Jane
Jane here is not a woman’s name, but the Journal/Name Author Estimator.*
You take your abstract, plug it into a text field on the Jane web page, and press ‘Find journals’. Alternatively you can find authors or find articles.
Jane will take the words in the abstract and search a database built from Medline to locate the first 50 articles that are most similar to your abstract and from these suggest a journal, authors or related articles as a list ranked by matching scores.
As their blurb says, it as several applications:
Have you recently written a paper, but you’re not sure to which journal you should submit it? Or maybe you want to find relevant articles to cite in your paper? Or are you an editor, and do you need to find reviewers for a particular paper? Jane can help!
One small thought I have about this, is that in the case of locating journals, it will locate the choir that sings the same message, rather than necessarily the audience you want to sing your message to.
It seems a useful tool, one that nicely complements more limited keyword searches, yet I don’t hear it mentioned much. With all that literature out there we need better ways of identifying related research. Give it a whirl, perhaps?
(Be aware, though, that because of the way Jane works, it won’t necessarily give you the original article if you chose to test it on an already-published article’s abstract.)
Jane is the work of the Biosemantics group at Rotterdam.

H/T @Jennifer Rohn & @cebmblog.
Footnotes
* Seriously, people, some of the acronyms for software products are just a little much. (I forgive them for ‘Jane’ – it’s fun in it’s own way.) I mean some make me feel as if I live in a subplot of Get Smart, although to be fair neither CONTROL or KAOS were acronyms. Apparently. My undergraduate campus featured KAOS of another sort, this one definitely an acronym – Killing As an Organised Sport. Here students were assigned the a ‘target’ they were to ‘hit’ with a … water pistol. Some wits rigged up water pistol driven by drenching packs, and could they shoot a long way! Understandably, the university had to ban KAOS from operations within lecture theatres and buildings. All the meant was ambushes were staked at the exits… But I’m getting way off-topic, here.
Schuemie, M., & Kors, J. (2008). Jane: suggesting journals, finding experts Bioinformatics, 24 (5), 727-728 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn006
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GoPubMed – PubMed browsing using ontologies
Find transcription factor motifs in genomes better: add histone acetylation data
Career paths, redux – the academic research career is the exception
0 Responses to “Find a home for your research paper, authors, related papers – ask Jane”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Grant Jacobs, Sciblogs NZ. Sciblogs NZ said: Find a home for your research paper, authors, related papers – ask Jane: Jane here is not a woman’s name, but th… http://bit.ly/dR3ht7 […]
Well, Jane reckons this manuscript has to go to PNAS. Who am I to argue !
(It’s actually written to appeal to readers/editors of another journal, which game 3rd on the list, so it must be on the right track)
Sounds though it might be useful for generating possible journals, but my advice is ask your colleagues, because there are very important differences between journals in terms of how quickly they process papers, and in rejection rates.
You also want a journal that has good editors and not automatons, sloths or deities , see:
http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2010/09/science-journal-editors-taxonomy.html
Dorothy,
my advice is ask your colleagues
Absolutely! I don’t think that these kinds of tools will ever be a final answer, but possibly some reader will find it another tool in their bag of tricks. I don’t mean to be advocating this tool (certainly not as a “one-stop†solution), so much as presenting for people to try & judge for themselves.
David,
Jane reckons this manuscript has to go to PNAS. Who am I to argue !
Ah, yes. We’d all like that, eh?! 🙂
I wonder if it’s effectively biased towards the larger and/or more prestigious journals – ?
Certainly it won’t be a judge of the “level†of the science presented in the abstract, only the words present within it.
Kukbe replied via twitter:
@BioinfoTools I use JANE a lot actually, It is great to find suitable reviewers for papers, and detect ‘originality of submissions
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