The “Statement on Article Publication Resulting from NIH Funded Research”, released on November 3, 2017 by the National Institutes of Health, stressed that “authors are encouraged to publish their results in reputable journals” because publications using questionable practices “may call into question the credibility of the research they report”.

In the statement, researchers were directed by the NIH to these useful resources to help guide their journal selection decisions:

• Think Check Submit
• Academics and scientists: Beware of predatory journal publishers
• Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals
• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

In January 2018, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the NIH and responsible for PubMed and PubMed Central, will further assist researchers in selecting more reputable journals by changing the way that journal titles NOT in the NLM collection are displayed in the NLM Catalog, LocatorPlus, and PubMed’s link to Journals in NCBI Databases.

NLM includes the records of journals that have officially been selected for inclusion in the Library’s collection (based on journal guidelines from the NLM Collection Development Manual), as well as, journals that have NOT been chosen for inclusion in the collection  but still appear in the NLM Catalog “to support the processes of NLM products and services such as PubMed Central (PMC), MEDLINE, GenBank, interlibrary loan, and others”. As such, it has been very confusing up until now for users of the NLM Catalog records to distinguish between the reputable titles officially selected for inclusion in the NLM collection and those not deemed worthy for inclusion by NLM’s collection development librarians.

The Library’s decision regarding a journal title’s inclusion in the NLM collection can be considered as a quality indicator. Researchers will now be able to use this information to guide their decision-making when trying to identify credible publications worthy of submitting their manuscripts to for publication.The new notation (Collection Status: Not in the NLM Collection) should make it more obvious to users of the NLM Catalog as to which journal titles were evaluated and selected for inclusion in the Library’s collections by NLM librarians versus those titles that were NOT.

Fig. 1. “Advanced techniques in biology & medicine”[Jour] search in the NLM Catalog

For more guidance on evaluating the quality of journals and avoiding predatory journal publishers, feel free to Ask Us at the MSK Library.