Discovery Research Tool: F1000Prime

This article was written by Nick Patler, and edited by Kimberley Barker.
 

F1000Prime, or “Faculty” 1000Prime, is a research discovery tool powered by over 8,000 leading experts in medicine and biology who are selected by a peer nominating process. These experts, who include Nobel Laureates, Lasker Award winners, and Fellows of the Royal Society, provide commentary and opinions on the most important studies from thousands of journals globally. Currently, there are over thirty UVA doctors and life science researchers who contribute their expertise to F1000Prime.

For the researcher, F1000Prime provides a direct portal into the most relevant studies and significant advances related to his/her research area with insights from the best experts in the world.

For example, if one types “Epigenetics; Cancer,” into the search box, one gets thirty-five section options related to the search; each result includes pictures of the “Section Heads” who are the F1000 experts for that specialty area. When one places the cursor over the “Show Topic” box to the right of each option, a dropdown menu appears that shows the topics covered.  In this case, the closest match comes from the “Cancer Therapeutics” section menu, “Cancer genomics and epigenomics.”





To view related articles, check the left box and then go over to the right side of the screen and click “Next”; this goes to a page with relevant scholarship, including rankings and commentary from the experts.

One of the most unique features of this discovery tool is its open research publishing platform called F1000Research. While F1000Prime sifts through a multitude of studies to find the best published research in the world, F1000Research offers research as it is unfolding in real-time. It provides a non-traditional scholarly setting where researchers can expedite the dissemination of their latest unpublished research, data, posters, and slides with the larger life sciences and clinical community. Though an open sharing source, submissions undergo a post-publication peer review process by leading experts with suggested revisions to assure scientific integrity.

While data published on F1000Research does not have a formal impact factor (as does research published in a journal), it nevertheless makes an impact. Open source research is accessed thousands of times by the professional community, thus expanding the horizons of data sharing, professional dialogue, and research possibility. Moreover, a majority of the peer-reviewed F1000Research articles are soon indexed on PubMed.  

The final major feature of this discovery tool is F1000Workspace. This allows researchers to import references, and collect new references from multiple discovery tools, and highlight and share text with members of a shared project team or even multiple teams. Workspace makes collaboration easy with extensive sharing capabilities and the ability to easily accommodate a multitude of articles and citations. 

The three major components of F1000—Prime, Research and Workspace—together create a uniquely comprehensive research tool for the life sciences and clinical community to identify, access, and share the best research available, as well as the latest research as it is unfolding. This enables professionals to stay abreast of, and contribute to, the latest studies, which are crucial for serving the health of patients and communities.