The information sent to the Jane server is not stored. It is kept in memory for as long as needed to calculate the scores and formulate the response page, and then it is discarded from memory. The server itself is protected using standard protection measures. However, we understand that there is still the possibility that someone could intercept the transmission, and of course you do not know whether you can trust us. We therefore included an option in Jane to 'scramble' your input (see the button below the input box). Scrambling simply entails putting all the words in alphabetical order, and this is done by your browser (i.e. no information is sent for the scrambling). We admit that putting the words in alphabetical order does not completely disguise your input, but it does make it extremely hard to read, and it has no effect on the performance of Jane.
Jane first searches for the 50 articles that are most similar to your input*. For each of these articles, a similarity score between that article and your input is calculated. The similarity scores of all the articles belonging to a certain journal or author are summed to calculate the confidence score for that journal or author. The results are ranked by confidence score. For more information, you can read our paper.
* For the computer geeks: we use the open source search engine Lucene. Queries using keywords are parsed with the QueryParser class, titles and abstracts are parsed using the MoreLikeThis parser class.
We are currently updating the data once every month.
Basically, all journals included in PubMed are included in Jane. However, in order to show only active journals, we do not show journals for which no entry was found in PubMed in the last year.
All authors that have published one or more articles in the last 10 years that have been included in PubMed, are included in Jane.
All records in PubMed have been included that:
The Article Influence (AI) measures how often articles in the journal are cited within the first five years after its publication. These citations are weighted based the influence of the journals from which citations are received: being cited in an article in Science can boost a journal's AI more than being cited in an article in an obscure journal. For more detailed information, see the eigenfactor.org website.
Yes, there is an API that is freely available. A brief description can be found here.