Faculty Opinions

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.