The journal impact factor is an annually calculated number for each scientific journal, based on the average number of times its articles published in the two preceding years have been cited.

Much like the trade and traits of bubbles in financial markets, similar bubbles appear on the science market.

Abstract: A semi-supervised model of peer review is introduced that is intended to overcome the bias and incompleteness of traditional peer review. Traditional approaches are reliant on human biases, while consensus decision-making is constrained by sparse information. Here, the architecture for one potential improvement (a semi-supervised, human-assisted classifier) to the traditional approach will be introduced and evaluated.

Definitive solutions won’t come from another million observational papers or small randomized trials by John P A Ioannidis

A new type of initiative is empowering graduate students and postdocs to reshape their academic training, providing another avenue to express their passion for research.

The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations.

Everyone, it seems, loves the idea of scholars interdisciplinary work. But does academe reward those -- particular young scholars -- who actually do it?

Report quality is significantly higher on the open peer review model for questions relating to comments on the methods and study design, supplying evidence to substantiate comments and constructiveness.

Building the Models and Analytics for an Open Access Future.

In this essay, we describe why article-level metrics are an important extension of traditional citation-based journal metrics and provide a number of example from Article-level metrics data collected for PLOS Biology.

It's been just over a decade since the concept of Open Access first captured the attention of the scientific and scholarly research community.

This issue on Open Access marks the 10-year anniversary of PLOS Biology, and it's as good a time as any to pause and take stock of how the last decade.

How big a role do unconventional combinations of existing knowledge play in the impact of a scientific paper? A new study shows that the highest-impact papers were not the ones that had the greatest novelty, but had a combination of novelty and otherwise conventional combinations of prior work.

A summary of the most interesting research results on peer review.

So much science, so little time. Amid an ever-increasing mountain of research articles, data sets and other output, hard-pressed research funders and employers need shortcuts to identify and reward the work that matters.

Every organization that funds research wants to support science that makes a difference. But there is no simple formula for identifying truly important research. And the job is becoming more difficult.