Web applications gives insight to 57.136 researchers every month.
Elsevier Journal Insights
Researchers would most like to publish in scientific journals with academic prestige and that get read by the right peers. Webmine developed an advanced web application that gives insight into the key metrics of more than two thousand scientific journals from the portfolio of Elsevier.
Researchers can publish their papers against payment in open access journals. The costs of such a publication would be paid by the author or their employer. Whoever wants to be sure that the paper will reach the right audience will have to pick the right publication very carefully. The acceptation process can take weeks or even months. If the article gets rejected you can start over again.
As such it’s important to choose a journal that fits well with the quality of your article. Aim too high and you it might get rejected. Aim too low and you might harm your academic reputation. Publishing takes quite a bit of preparation. Elsevier, publisher of more than 2000 scientific journals wants to help authors by giving them insights they require.
The question
How can we give researchers insight into indicators such as impact, publication speed, and reach of journals?
Journal Insights
Elsevier hired interactive design company and specialist in data visualisation CLEVER°FRANKE on board. They though up and designed Journal Insights for them. Webmine was responsible for the technical realisation of this online data experience.
Journal Insights is a web application that visualises the relevant core numbers, scores and statistics of the journals in Elsevier’s portfolio in a pleasant, user friendly way for researchers around the world.
Data of impeccable quality
The foundation of the site is formed by the large dataset that originates from Elsevier’s systems. This data gets refreshed at set times. To make sue the data in the system is consistent and reliable it first gets automatically checked and cleaned by the system. Every value gets inspected. When a journal gets a rating that’s way too high or makes a sudden jump it immediately sends out a signal. By quickly identifying mistakes and questionable ratings the system makes sure that the data that forms the core of the service is of impeccable quality.
Quality is at the forefront of Webmine's values. To guarantee the quality of our projects we maintain a method of working that makes the web applications and apps we deliver as stable, secure and fast as possible.
Attractive visualisations
The data on Elsevier’s journals gets processed in all sorts of ways by the web application. Every publication has their own mini website on which the relevant statistics get presented in an attractive way. For every journal the mini-site shows the impact factor, the 5 year impact factor, the Eigenfactor, the Souce-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), and the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).
Journal Insights also shows how much time a publication needs on average to publish your article. And from which countries the authors who publish in it come from. That says something about the reach of the publication.
Beautiful infographics
Modern browsers display this information in a clean, beautifully animated infographic. These SVG-files are one hundred percent scaleable. Because scientific research doesn’t know borders the web application targets researchers from around the world. Not every researcher owns the most advanced computers. That’s why the system generates static graphics where its needed in a file format that also works on older browsers.
Visitors from around the world
The result of the fantastic design work by CLEVER°FRANKE and our technical realisation is a successful website that gets visited by more than 40000 people around the world every month. Since the beginning in 2012 journalinsights.elsevier.com has been used over a million times.
Also for marketers
The data about the journals isn’t just interesting to researchers, but also to Elsevier’s marketers. In the ‘backside’ of the system they can easily make all sorts of comparisons between different journals. The graphics that get generated by the system can then be easily exported as clean, transparant PNG’s to be used in their own presentations.
The technology
Journal Insights is an advanced web application with complex visualisations that’s approachable from every device.
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