Scientific journal
[1] These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines.
Unlike professional or trade magazines, the articles are mostly written by scientists rather than staff writers employed by the journal.
Scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content.
The advent of electronic publishing has further expanded the reach and accessibility of scientific journals, enabling more efficient dissemination and retrieval of information, while also addressing challenges related to cost and copyright.
They additionally cover information related to work, and include tips and advice for improving performance, but they are not scholarly.
Their intended audience is others in the field (such as students and experts), meaning their content is more advanced and sophisticated than what is found regular publications.
Articles tend to be highly technical, representing the latest theoretical research and experimental results in the field of science covered by the journal.
There are also scientific publications that bridge the gap between articles and books by publishing thematic volumes of chapters from different authors.
[3] In 1665, the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began systematically publishing research results.
Reviewers are expected to check the paper for soundness of its scientific argument, including whether the author(s) are sufficiently acquainted with recent relevant research that bears on their study, whether the data was collected or considered appropriately and reproducibly, and whether the data discussed supports the conclusion offered and the implications suggested.
Novelty is also key: existing work must be appropriately considered and referenced, and new results improving on the state of the art presented.
Some journals, such as Nature, Science, PNAS, and Physical Review Letters, have a reputation of publishing articles that mark a fundamental breakthrough in their respective fields.
In some countries, journal rankings can be utilized for funding decisions[18] and even evaluation of individual researchers, although they are poorly suited for that purpose.
[7] The reproducibility of results presented in an article is therefore judged implicitly by the quality of the procedures reported and agreement with the data provided.
New tools such as JATS and Utopia Documents provide a 'bridge' to the 'web-versions' in that they connect the content in PDF versions directly to the World Wide Web via hyperlinks that are created 'on-the-fly'.
[24] Electronic counterparts of established print journals already promote and deliver rapid dissemination of peer-reviewed and edited, "published" articles.
In tandem with this is the speeding up of peer review, copyediting, page makeup, and other steps in the process to support rapid dissemination.
[5] Moreover, electronic publishing of scientific journals has been accomplished without compromising the standards of the refereed, peer review process.
In a similar manner, most academic libraries buy the electronic version and purchase a paper copy only for the most important or most-used titles.
In many fields in which even greater speed is wanted, such as physics, the role of the journal at disseminating the latest research has largely been replaced by preprint databases such as arXiv.org.
Almost all such articles are eventually published in traditional journals, which still provide an important role in quality control, archiving papers, and establishing scientific credit.
Many scientists and librarians have long protested the cost of journals, especially as they see these payments going to large for-profit publishing houses.
However, professional editors still have to be paid, and PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs; smaller journals do not often have access to such resources.
Based on statistical arguments, it has been shown that electronic publishing online, and to some extent open access, both provide wider dissemination and increase the average number of citations an article receives.
However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory,[29] and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead.
Under such a system, the publisher has permission to edit, print, and distribute the article commercially, but the authors retain the other rights themselves.
