key: cord-0722137-ghtxe0i2 authors: Weaver, Matt title: Where to Publish: helping health sciences professionals find journals for publication quickly and safely date: 2021-10-01 journal: Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA DOI: 10.5195/jmla.2021.1355 sha: ed95f17e509b9481796a1f86370e01bffb9a9675 doc_id: 722137 cord_uid: ghtxe0i2 nan Where to Publish was built in the Python programming language. The library chose the Flask web framework because it is lightweight, well supported, and appropriate for small websites. WTForms, a Python module for generating and validating form input in web platforms, receives the user's search terms. The site's core script uses the Biopython module, which includes the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Entrez application programming interface (API), to return journals ranked by the number of times the journal has published papers that fit the search criteria. Where to Publish uses Clarivate Analytics' journal impact factor (JIF) as an indicator of journal quality in two respects. First, JIF is used by Cleveland Clinic in physicians' annual performance reviews. Second, by providing a list of journals with JIFs, Where to Publish ensures that authors will avoid low-quality journals due to Clarivate's rigorous journal selection criteria [1] , especially as predatory journals have been getting their papers into PubMed via PubMed Central [2] . Sorting by JIF works as follows: • A file is created using the NLM's eDirect command line utility that contains all NLM catalog journal records and data fields like ISSNs. For each search, the core Python script passes PubMed IDs to the Web of Science APIs to retrieve papers-level metadata from Web of Science. The script compares the papers' ISSNs against the journal list generated in eDirect and produces tables of journals with and without JIFs. Open access indicators and additional metrics are attached for journals with JIFs. In its first full year, May 2019 to May 2020, Where to Publish was searched 413 times. Usage was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine students and many residents were sent home in March 2020. Removing similar searches by users as they refined results, the number of unique search topics was 206. If all unique search topics became papers, they would represent around 3.4% of the some 6,000 papers a year published by Cleveland Clinic in Web of Science-indexed journals [3] . Web of Science journal evaluation process and selection criteria How predatory journals leak into PubMed Clarivate Analytics. InCites benchmarking and analytics Update on PubMed specialized search queries: selected queries no longer updated; remain available for download and customization Where to Publish is being used by Cleveland Clinic authors to locate relevant journals for publication.Future development includes a revision of the data in the output so it is easier to read and the addition of journals' URLs so users can get to submission guidelines quickly.In addition, the library is working on a separate, bespoke search for authors in nursing and allied health professionals. This interface will use inclusion in CINAHL as a quality indicator. PubMed is no longer supporting its Nursing Journals filter [4], so using CINAHL's API will ensure that authors receive a reliable list of relevant journals.