Say hello to Jot: a free, open-source web application that matches manuscripts in the fields of biomedicine and life sciences with suitable journals, based on a manuscript’s title, abstract, and (optionally) citations.
Developed by the Townsend Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, Jot gathers a wealth of data on journal quality, impact, fit, and open access options that can be explored through a dashboard of linked, interactive visualizations.
Jot presents journal-match statistics (C, A, T); Directory of Online, Access Journals (DOAJ) listing, seal, and annotation with copyright ownership, maximum article processing charge, average time to publication, and preservation databases. Also listed are the (P)rospect for acceptance, the (Expected impact of submission, MedLine, and PubMedCentral listing, and manuscript journal quantitative similarity metrics. Image Source: Townsend Lab
While other journal search tools are available online, Jot is believed to be the first that is free and open source, and the most comprehensive in terms of the scope of journals and metadata that it provides. Moreover, Jot creates a unique, composite metric of journal ‘fit’ and impact, giving researchers a clearer idea of the potential publication of a given submission.
“We hope that by sharing Jot with the wider research community—without cost and with the freedom to modify, tailor, and improve it—authors can benefit from a more comprehensive and informed view of their publishing options,” said Jeffrey Townsend, Yale’s Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Jot has proven useful for our laboratory and has been enthusiastically adopted by our colleagues.”
Jot’s Prospect metric is a proxy for the ‘chance of your manuscript being accepted’. The metric doesn’t evaluate science but attempts to capture the ratio of ‘fit in your favor’ to ‘all considerations, including fit and journal prestige, for or against acceptance’. Image Source: Townsend Lab
Townsend and Stephen Gaffney, an associate research scientist in biostatistics at Yale, co-authored a commentary introducing Jot to the greater scientific community in December. The commentary appears in the Journal of the Medical Library Association.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
