Faculty Opinions

'Science you shouldn't miss' - expert-based article recommendation service

In a nutshell

Launched in 2002, Faculty Opinions(formerly F1000 Prime) is an article recommendations service. Faculty Opinions was designed to help researchers to navigate an expanding corpus of scholarly literature, providing an easy way for researchers to discover emerging content that might have relevance for their research and/or to support the formulation of new ideas and potential collaboration. Faculty Opinions effectively provides an expert (peer) curated service of published research that 'shouldn't be missed'.

The faculty is a virtual collection of peer-nominated scientific experts (n=8000) from across the globe; Faculty Members (FMs) are required to write a short summary of the key interest points in any article that they find either interesting, novel, challenging (and other categories/classifiers of interest); alongside the summary , FMs provide a semantic rating - ‘Exceptional'; 'Very good'; 'Good’.

The recommendations provide by Faculty Opinions complement quantitative article-based citation metrics, providing a qualitative expert (human) view of the potential importance, interest and impact of a piece of research. It is estimated that round 1.5-2% of articles in PubMed are recommended in Faculty Opinions per annum. All recommendations receive a DOI and are fully citable thus allowing transparency and visibility of the peer review activity involved and the recommendations to potentially inform other research; all articles receiving a recommendation in Faculty Opinions are flagged in the article Crossref record. We are working hard to secure ORCIS ids for all FMs and already push recommendations to an individual ORICD id to help provide recogntion of the efforts of FMs.

Traditionally, the audience and subscriber base for Faculty Opinions has been Research and Institution Libraries. Latterly, Faculty Opinions is used by funding agencies and Institutions to support research impact assessment, evaluation and practical services such as peer review selection and grant management.

Currently Faculty Opinions is a service focusing on recommendations in the life and medical sciences; however during 2019 Faculty Opinions 's scope is being broadened to cover psychology and the physical sciences with more to come.

Goals and intentions

Faculty Opinions intends to provide a route for qualitative (post-publication) review and commenting - the USP of Faculty Opinions is that the recommendations are provided by independent experts. Faculty Opinions intends to serve as a complement to more quantitative article-based citation metrics.

Project status

Active

Types of outputs

Review process

Review requested by

Authors
Reviewer selected by

Editor, service, or community
Public interaction

No
Author response

Yes
Decision

Other scale or rating

Review policy

Review coverage

Complete paper
Reviewer identity known to

Public
Competing interests

Checked

Social Networks

Video

Review features

Manuscript hosting

No
Notes

All recommendations are assigned a DOI and are citable and useable in other platforms, and pushed openly to the Crossref article record; user commenting functionality in development and coming soon 2019.
Eligible reviewers/editors

All recommendations have to be provided by an appointed Faculty member. There are currently c8000 virtual Faculty Members – all are peer nominated and approved by the appointed Heads of each Faculty – all must be Associate Professor (or equivalent) and above. F1000 manages the services but has no influence in who is appointed nor what is recommended – experts are independent.
Criteria for inclusion

A research output (could be an article, a pre-print, an other type of research output – and we are working to encourage recommendation of a broader range of research output types) has to be recommended by an appointed Faculty Member to be included in Faculty Opinions; any conflicts of interest associated with recommending a specific output must be openly declared.
Explanation of cost

It varies depending on the type of the institution and number of active users; though F1000 offers free 30-day trials to all potentially interested clients. Please contact for more information. https://f1000.com/subscriptions