Academic Publishing Glossary
Every abbreviation, metric, and term in academic publishing — explained in plain language. From ISSN to FWCI, from preprint to galley proof.
APC
An Article Processing Charge (APC) is a fee paid by authors or their institutions to cover the cost of making …
Acceptance Rate
The acceptance rate is the percentage of submitted manuscripts that a journal ultimately publishes. Highly selective journals like Nature and …
Altmetrics
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) measure the online attention a research paper receives beyond traditional citations. They track mentions in news outlets, …
Article Processing Charge (APC)
An Article Processing Charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors …
CC-BY
Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) is the most permissive Creative Commons license used in open access publishing. It allows anyone to …
COPE
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a non-profit organization that provides guidance on ethical standards in scholarly publishing. COPE …
CiteScore
CiteScore is Elsevier's journal metric, calculated as the number of citations received in a given year to documents published in …
Clarivate Analytics
Clarivate Analytics is the company that operates the Web of Science citation database and publishes the annual Journal Citation Reports …
Corresponding Author
The corresponding author is the researcher designated to handle communication with the journal throughout the submission, review, and publication process. …
CrossRef
Crossref is a non-profit organization that maintains the official DOI registration system for scholarly publications. When a publisher assigns a …
DOAJ
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated online directory that indexes high-quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ …
DOI
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a permanent, unique alphanumeric string assigned to a published article, dataset, or other digital …
DORA
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a worldwide initiative that recommends against using journal-level metrics (particularly impact …
Desk Rejection
A desk rejection occurs when the journal editor rejects a submitted manuscript without sending it for peer review. Common reasons …
Diamond Open Access
Diamond Open Access (also called Platinum OA) refers to journals that charge no fees to authors (no APC) and no …
Elsevier
Elsevier is the largest academic publisher in the world, operating over 2,700 journals including The Lancet, Cell, and hundreds of …
Embargo Period
An embargo period is the interval during which an author may not self-archive the published or accepted version of their …
FWCI
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) is an article-level metric that compares a paper's citations to the world average for papers of …
Galley Proof
A galley proof (or page proof) is the formatted version of an accepted manuscript sent to authors for final review …
H-Index
The h-index is a metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and the citation impact of a specific researcher's …
Hybrid Journal
A hybrid journal is a subscription-based journal that offers authors the option to make individual articles open access by paying …
IF
Impact Factor (IF), formally the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is the average number of citations received in a given year …
ISSN
The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit code used to uniquely identify a serial publication such as a …
Impact Factor
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a proprietary metric used to rank the relative importance of a journal within its …
JCR
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Clarivate Analytics that provides the official Journal Impact Factor for journals …
Mega Journal
A mega journal is a very large open access journal that accepts papers based on scientific soundness rather than perceived …
OA
Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that makes research articles freely available to readers without a subscription. The main …
ORCID
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a 16-digit persistent identifier for individual researchers, formatted as 0000-0000-0000-0000. It disambiguates researchers …
Open Access
Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that provides unrestricted, free online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. By removing the …
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is a free, open-source catalog of the global research system, maintained by the nonprofit OurResearch. It indexes over 250 …
Peer Review
Peer review is the essential quality-control process of academic publishing. Before a manuscript is accepted, it is subjected to the …
Plan S
Plan S is a European initiative launched in 2018 requiring that research funded by participating national agencies and funders must …
Postprint
A postprint (also called an accepted manuscript or author's accepted manuscript, AAM) is the version of a paper after peer …
Predatory Journal
A predatory journal is a publication that exploits the open access model by charging APCs while providing little or no …
Preprint
A preprint is a version of a research paper that is shared publicly before formal peer review. Preprints are typically …
PubMed
PubMed is a free search engine maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, providing access to the MEDLINE database …
Quartile (Q1-Q4)
In journal rankings, quartiles divide all journals in a subject category into four equal groups based on their impact factor …
Revise and Resubmit
Revise and Resubmit (R&R), also called Major Revision, is a decision where the editor asks the author to address the …
SJR
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a journal-level metric calculated from Scopus data using an algorithm similar to Google's PageRank. A …
SNIP
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), developed at Leiden University, measures a journal's contextual citation impact by weighting citations based …
Scopus
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, operated by Elsevier. It covers over 27,000 journals across …
Subscription Journal
A subscription journal charges libraries or individual readers for access to its content. Authors typically do not pay APCs. The …
Time to First Decision
Time to first decision is the average number of days between manuscript submission and the editor's first decision (accept, reject, …
WoS
Web of Science (WoS), operated by Clarivate Analytics, is one of the two largest citation databases alongside Scopus. It indexes …
eISSN
The electronic ISSN (eISSN or e-ISSN) is the ISSN assigned to the electronic (online) version of a serial publication. Many …