Despite many people being on vacation, the work of the journal continues and so we will continue to receive a large number of emails from authors, academic editors, reviewers and readers throughout this period. Between our offices in the UK and the US, we will have some level of staff coverage every day except for Christmas Day (December 25), but with some team members being out of the office, we may not be able to respond to emails sent to the PLoS ONE inbox (plosone@plos.org) as quickly as usual. We will respond to your message as soon as we can, but in the meantime, you may wish to visit some of the following pages on our websites, which may help to answer your question:

• Journal information: http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
• Author guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/guidelines.action
• Author FAQ blog post: http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/authors/qa/
• Figure and table guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/figureGuidelines.action
• Author submission checklist: http://www.plosone.org/static/checklist.action
• Information about article-level metrics: http://www.plosone.org/static/usageData.action
• Reviewer guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/reviewerGuidelines.action
• Information about Open Access: http://www.plos.org/oa/

At PLoS, we’re dedicated to the tenet of Open Access, making academic literature widely available on the web. However, with an ever-growing pool of scientific literature, our goals have to consider not only making content available, but also accessible. With the breadth of articles we aggregate, you need a strong tool to find the specific information you want. Our authors have published on methods to get the most out of search engine queries and even how search engine data can yield its own important results. To help our users navigate the sea of information PLoS publishes daily, we introduced an Advanced Search function with a broad range of filters.

When searching for PLoS articles, the standard search bar at the top of the page will return all results where the term has been mentioned throughout the entire article (see Figure 1). While this is good for very specific searches, a search for a term like “influenza” will yield over 2,000 results across the PLoS journals. This is where the Advanced Search’s filtering system comes in handy.

Figure 1

Advanced Search

Advanced Search provides multiple filters for results by limiting what field you’re searching (Title, Abstract, Author Name, etc). Using the pull-down menu (Figure 2), you can search for your term in the Title or Abstract of the article, which makes it more likely that the article is focused on that subject. You can also search for specific authors, editors or author affiliations. This allows you to find papers published or edited by your colleagues or researchers at a specific institution.

You can make your search more targeted and powerful but using the search box to combine these different searches using the qualifiers AND, OR or NOT, limiting the search results further. For example, you can shorten the results by saying you want articles that mention “influenza” in the abstract, but NOT “vaccine.”

Figure 2

Advanced Filters

Below the search block is a series of filters that allows you to limit your results further: Journal, Subject Category and Article Type (Figure 3). This allows you to filter the search results down to specific PLoS journals, or a subject area you are studying (e.g., Genetics of Disease or Systems Biology) or down to a particular article type, like Research Articles or Editorials.

Figure 3

Sorting Results

After performing the search, you can sort the results using an additional drop-down menu, found at the top of the search results. “Relevance” is the default setting, but you can also sort by Most Viewed, which will yield the most popular article by page views meeting your search criteria, and Date—so you see the newest items that have published since the last time you performed your keyword search.

Related to the sorting types, each search result features links its Views, Citations and Bookmarks. Hovering over these links provides a breakdown of each statistic. Views will be broken down to the number of views in each format (HTML, XML and PDF) and Citations will break down by databases the citations are listed in (e.g., PubMed Central or Web of Science®) (Figure 4).

Figure 4

In addition to publishing the highest quality scientific research, PLoS is dedicated to making our content accessible to our audience. Our team is always working to find new ways to assist the readers of our journals, and we hope that our Advanced Search will get you the information that you seek.

In addition, we also have the same functionality operating at the article level. The widget is able to display tweets about a particular article by looking for the article DOI appearing in an ‘unpacked’ URL. If there are no tweets for a particular article, it will not appear.

The paper, Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader’s Regional Accent, is a nice example of this widget in use.

We should point out that this handy widget has a few limitations.  For one, the widget isn’t able to store tweets for all eternity.  It will only be able to show recent tweets. Also, it isn’t connected to our Article Level Metrics …yet (we’re working on it though).

Otherwise, we think this widget will make a nice new addition to our site and will be a helpful way to see what our community is saying.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen an increased number of questions from authors of recently published papers querying us about why their paper isn’t found in PubMed.  So this week, I thought it would be helpful to address the timeline for articles appearing in PubMed and PubMed Central.

Upon the publication of your paper, your files are sent directly to PubMed Central. At this point, it takes an average of 3-5 days to appear in PubMed Central, and 1-1/2 to 2 weeks to appear in PubMed. These delays are due to internal quality control checks and data processing that PubMed Central and PubMed conduct on the files.

To find answers to more commonly asked questions please check out our Most Common Questions page. If you have a more immediate question though, please contact us directly at plosone [at] plos.org.

In addition, our Advanced Search also now allows you to search within figure and table caption text (useful information for those participating in our PLoS/Mendeley ‘Binary Battle’ API Competition!).

Before

After

PLoS and Mendeley, the popular reference manager and academic social network, have teamed up to create a Binary Battle contest to build the best apps that make science more open using PLoS and/or Mendeley’s APIs (Application Programming Interface). There’s $16,000 in prize money to be won plus other cool gifts and the opportunity to get your entries in front of a panel of influential judges from technology, media and science that include:

Tim O’Reilly – Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media which is changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Tim also co-hosts the annual Science Foo Camp with Google and Nature.

Dr. Werner Vogels – CTO of Amazon.com and former research scientist at Cornell University. Werner is one of world’s top experts on cloud computing and ultra-scalable systems.

Juan Enriquez – Managing Director of Excel Venture Management and CEO of Biotechonomy. Juan is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences.

John Wilbanks – VP for Science at Creative Commons. Seed Magazine named John a “Game Changer” among their Revolutionary Minds of 2008.

James Powell – CTO of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading information services company. Still a nerd at heart, James is particularly interested in how technology gets applied to solve problems.

We have two APIs for you to mine in this competition. The PLoS Search API allows anyone to build their own applications for the web, desktop or mobile devices using PLoS content. The Mendeley API opens up a database of over 80 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations. Since Mendeley got this competition up and running before PLoS joined the party, you can see what some people have already made using their API. It’s also worth knowing that Mendeley are organizing two simultaneous Hackathons at their NY and London offices on Saturday June 11-Sunday June 12, 2011.

Here’s the lowdown on the amazing prizes:

* Grand prize: $10001 + $1000 Amazon Web Services Credits
* Second prize: $5000 + $500 Amazon Web Services Credits – an extra $1000 plus a Parrott AR Drone Quadricopter is available to the best combined PLoS/Mendeley app.
* Last day to submit your app: September 30th 2011
* Winner announced on: November 30th 2011

Entries will be judged on criteria such as: activity; popularity/usefulness; whether it increases collaboration and/or transparency and how cool is it (does it make our jaws drop!). Please note, we can not accept entries from PLoS or Mendeley staff or their immediate families, their investors or board members. To get started, developers need to get a key from PLoS, Mendeley or both. Don’t forget, the last day to submit your app is September 30th 2011.

This video is for PLoS ONE academic editors who would like to discuss a manuscript with another academic editor in Editorial Manager.

Back to FAQ page

This is a general tutorial for PLoS ONE reviewers and will give an overview of how to navigate the reviewer action links in Editorial Manager.

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This tutorial is for PLoS ONE academic editors who need to re-invite peer reviewers to a revised manuscript.

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This tutorial is for PLoS ONE authors who need to submit their revised manuscript in Editorial Manager.

Back to FAQ page