Scholarly Communication

PubMed vs. PubMed Central

PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) are often mistakenly thought of as the same database. To be officially recognized by PubMed, journals must be selected by the National Library of Medicine for inclusion in MEDLINE. This requires a review process to ensure that the journal meets the appropriate quality and technological standards necessary for inclusion in MEDLINE.

PubMed Central is a different database from PubMed and does not have the same stringent requirements for inclusion.  Articles from PMC may be searchable in PubMed, but this does not mean they are indexed in MEDLINE.  If a publisher claims that their journal is in PubMed, you should confirm that this means they are indexed in MEDLINE and not simply searchable in PubMed by appearing in PMC. 

The National Library of Medicine provides more information on the differences between PubMed and PMC.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an APC?

An Article Processing Charge or APC is affiliated with the gold open access publishing model.  Rather than funding publishing through institutional subscriptions, open access journals often fund their operations through APCs that the author, their institution, or funder pays after acceptance.  The APC amount varies drastically by subject and journal – APCs can be as low as $200 or as high as $11,000.  The best way to account for APCs is to build the cost of open access publishing into a grant application for sponsored research. 

What is meant by “research impact”?

‘Impact’ describes the reach and influence of a scholar’s work. Learn more about measuring research impact in this guide.

Can the Library help cover the cost of an APC?

While the Library supports open access funding and is continually searching for ways to better support authors who choose this model, at this time it is not financially possible for the Library to cover all APCs for all authors.  Much of the library’s collection funding goes toward providing access to subscription-based resources, which is still the prevailing model in academic publishing.  The Library is current seeking out memberships with publishers that will offset the cost of OA publishing, either through discounted APCs or full waivers.  While we cannot pay for individual APCs, we are continually working to develop solutions to shift the burden of these charges off of researchers and authors. APC costs differ dramatically by publisher and article type.  The best place to find the cost of an APC is through a publisher’s website.  

Where can I find out if a journal allows OA publishing avenues?

There are several tools that make finding information on open access, copyright, licensing, and publisher policies for individual journals easy (well, easier). Open policy finder is “an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis”. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is another helpful directory for finding OA policies for a specific journal of interest. You should also check the publisher’s posted copyright policy for more information on gold OA availability and self-archiving options.

What is a preprint?

A preprint is a term generally used to describe an unpublished research paper. An author may decide to submit a preprint to a preprint server or repository to gather feedback from other scholars and/or make findings immediately accessible to the public, though these manuscripts do not go through a peer-review process. bioRxiv and medRxiv are two preprint servers that will likely align with the specialties of medical students and researchers at Yale. Yale helped co-found medRxiv.

What is an ORCID profile and how do I set one up?

ORCID is a unique identifier assigned to an individual author to link the author to their scholarship across all platforms and potential name disambiguations. ORCID is free to sign up for and can help paint a more accurate picture of author impact by linking all of the author’s works and distinguishing between similarly named authors.  Some grant funding bodies now require an ORCID with manuscript submission.  Sign up for ORCID.