New features on Publons

Since launching Publons™ in 2012, we have expanded our mission. Building upon our commitment to help you get credit for peer review, we are also committed to helping you gain recognition for more of your contributions to scholarship throughout your career. That's why we display your publications and citations from the Web of Science Core Collection™ alongside your peer reviews and editor records.

After integrating with the Web of Science™ in 2019, we received many requests from users who access the Web of Science through their institution to improve the way the tools work together. Listening to community feedback has guided our development since day one and to meet the needs of researchers like you we will be moving Publons profiles into the Web of Science August 18, 2022.

When your profile moves to the Web of Science, you will be able to:

• Manage your profile more easily. Edit your details in one place, rather than two.
• Get notified when your work gets cited. You’ll receive automatic citation alerts for the publications in your profile that are indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.
• Get noticed by funders and potential collaborators. Your profile will be discoverable in a trusted database used by over 15 million researchers at more than 9,000 institutions worldwide.
• Continue to use your profile as usual. There will be no interruption in service, and you’ll find the same useful features that help you keep track of your verified peer reviews, editor records and publications.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Web of Science, you can learn more about it here. Your profile will continue to be freely available to all online as a Web of Science profile.

Since launching Publons™ in 2012, we have expanded our mission. Building upon our commitment to help you get credit for peer review, we are also committed to helping you gain recognition for more of your contributions to scholarship throughout your career. That's why we display your publications and citations from the Web of Science Core Collection™ alongside your peer reviews and editor records.

After integrating with the Web of Science™ in 2019, we received many requests from users who access the Web of Science through their institution to improve the way the tools work together. Listening to community feedback has guided our development since day one and to meet the needs of researchers like you we will be moving Publons profiles into the Web of Science in April 2022.

When your profile moves to the Web of Science, you will be able to:

• Manage your profile more easily. Edit your details in one place, rather than two.
• Get notified when your work gets cited. You’ll receive automatic citation alerts for the publications in your profile that are indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.
• Get noticed by funders and potential collaborators. Your profile will be discoverable in a trusted database used by over 15 million researchers at more than 9,000 institutions worldwide.
• Continue to use your profile as usual. There will be no interruption in service, and you’ll find the same useful features that help you keep track of your verified peer reviews, editor records and publications.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Web of Science, you can learn more about it here. Your profile will continue to be freely available to all online as a Web of Science profile.

If you're a Web of Science Core Collection indexed author, you may be aware of your Web of Science author record which unifies your contributions to the Core Collection and displays your citation metrics. This author record is updated when you claim Core Collection indexed publications and links back to your Publons profile.

As of today that author record also draws from your Publons profile to ensure your representation in Web of Science is as comprehensive and accurate as possible. Publons profile fields now displayed in your Web of Science author record include:

• profile picture
• display name
• primary institution affiliation
• Highly Cited Researcher and Publons peer review awards
• ORCiD ID
• verified peer review count
• verified editor record count
• verified journal/conference review counts per-venue
• verified editor record counts per journal/publisher
• verified grant review counts per funder
• signed publisher-invited review list (linking to Web of Science full records where reviewed paper is indexed)
• signed community review list (linking to Web of Science full records where reviewed paper is indexed)

Note: the Web of Science author record is only available to visitors with entitlements to Web of Science.

^ The above has been edited to highlight these new additions to the Web of Science author record

In addition to these fields displayed in the Web of Science author record, you can also find your signed and/or published reviews included as context in Web of Science article pages for Core Collection articles.

Reading peer review reports alongside final articles helps readers to better evaluate and understand the research they’re reading. We hope that positioning peer review content in the Web of Science alongside article metadata, full text links and citing article lists, will increase the visibility and utilization of that peer review information.

If you have access to the Web of Science Core Collection you can see an example of this open review content in WoS here.

Since Publons debuted the current profile design and the ability to track citations of your Web of Science Core Collection documents in 2018 we have also given you the ability to track Web of Science Core Collection citations of your documents in non-Core Collection indexes such as Zoological Record, MEDLINE, and BIOSIS.

As of today those Core Collection citations of non-Core Collection documents will continue to be shown alongside the individual documents on your profile but they will no longer be included in the aggregate metrics shown in various places in the product. We are making this change to better align Publons' researcher representation with the same in Web of Science and InCites.

The h-index on Publons will not change as it was already restricted to citations of and from the Web of Science Core Collection. The affected product areas are:

• "Total times cited" on researcher profile, metrics page, dashboard summary, and Publons CV
• "Publication impact over time" on profile metrics page, dashboard summary, and Publons CV
• "Web of Science documents" on profile metrics page, dashboard summary, and Publons CV
• "Average citations per document" on profile metrics page and dashboard summary
• "Average citations per year" on profile metrics page and dashboard summary

The overwhelming growth in journals has left many researchers struggling to find the best home for their manuscripts, which can be a daunting prospect after several long months producing research. Submitting to the wrong journal can hinder the impact of your manuscript. It could even result in a series of rejections, stalling both your research and career. Conversely, the right journal can help you showcase your research to the world in an environment consistent with your values.

In this blog post, we share tips for using publisher-neutral data and statistics to find the right journal for your research.

Get the tips

When you navigate to your profile, profile settings, or affiliation settings today you may notice a few things missing. In the interest of simplifying Publons we have removed the "blurb", non-institution affiliations, and country field from your profile's settings.

Blurb and non-institution affiliations were previously hidden behind the "show more" on your profile leaving them under-utilised. They were also both high risk, commonly targets of spam artists who used them to direct traffic through to other sites and boost their SEO.

We have not removed the ability to insert a custom / bespoke blurb for context in your Publons CV when you generate it.

The country field set in your profile settings was used only to filter the researcher and country browse tables and even that use was never clearly communicated. We will continue to filter those browse tables using your active institution affiliations (those with no end date).

We hope these changes are not too disruptive to you and that you can understand our reasoning.