Faculty of 1000 is a service for researchers and clinicians that provides ratings of and commentary on scientific research papers. The service acts as a filter, identifying and evaluating the most significant articles from biomedical research publications. A peer-nominated 'Faculty' of scientists and clinicians rate the articles they read and explain their importance.
Launched in 2002, F1000 was conceived as a collaboration of 1000 international Faculty Members. The Faculty now numbers more than 10,000. Faculty Members and their evaluations are organized into over 40 Faculties (subjects), which are further subdivided into over 300 Sections (sub-topics). As of January 2011, F1000 contains over 100,000 evaluations for papers from over 3000 different journals.
Faculty members select and evaluate important papers in their areas of expertise, usually tagging them as well to further classify papers as Clinical Trials, Novel Drug Targets etc.
F1000 rates research articles on their own merits rather than according to the prestige or Impact factor of the journal in which they are published.
The Faculty of 1000 service also includes F1000 Biology Reports and F1000 Medicine Reports journals, which present peer-reviewed commentaries on emerging themes in biology and medicine. These open access journals are currently indexed and/or abstracted by Scopus, Embase, Global Health, CAB Abstracts and PubMed Central.
In 2010, F1000 Posters (F1000Posters.com), an open access repository of posters and presentations from international conferences across biology and medicine was added to the F1000 service, and in 2011 F1000 launched a new journal ranking system. The F1000 Journal Factor (FFj) is a measure of how well an individual journal is performing on F1000. It is calculated from the individual FFa values and normalized according to the total number of eligible articles each journal has published. Journals are ranked by FFj down to Section (specialty) level.
Faculty of 1000 was founded by publishing entrepreneur Vitek Tracz. The company is part of Science Navigation Group, which also owns, Global DataPoint, Postcode Gazette, Current BioData, and Web of Stories.
Faculty of 1000 previously existed as two sister sites, F1000 Biology and F1000 Medicine. In 2010, these services were combined and launched as F1000.com.
On average, 1500 new evaluations are published on the F1000 site each month and over 3,000 journals are represented.
The Faculty includes 5 Nobel prize winners, 81 fellows of The Royal Society, 12 Lasker Award winners, 136 members of NAS and 97 members of the Institute of Medicine.