Introducing a new way to assess article importance and quality.

Scholarly Impact Quotient™ is our unique post-publication rating process that embraces the collective intelligence of the Cureus Journal Series community-at-large.

Why Should I Care?

SIQ™ is designed to supplement our pre-publication peer review process and allows authors to receive immediate, valuable reader feedback without the politics inherent in most other metrics determining so-called “importance.” We do not consider impact factor to be a reliable or useful metric of individual article importance.

SIQ is grounded in statistical power as a means of ensuring accuracy; the judgment of the many can diminish the biased influence of a few. Although the judgment of an individual or a limited number of peer reviewers may be flawed, SIQ harnesses the innate "wisdom of the crowd" (including peer reviewers, editors, colleagues, engineers and researchers in unrelated disciplines) to assess an article’s importance.

How Does SIQ Work?

All registered users are invited to contribute to the SIQ of any published article. (Only one rating per user per article and authors cannot rate their own articles.)

Cureus Journal Series users can assess and rate the relative merits of any published article by assigning a point value from 1 to 10 in a variety of categories:

Clarity of background and rationale

Study design and methods

Data analysis

Novelty of conclusions

Quality of presentation

Available scoring categories vary by article type.

Domain experts > non-specialists - specialty relevance is considered when weighting each individual SIQ rating.
SIQ is displayed after an article receives two ratings and is recalculated with each additional rating.
Rating articles with SIQ will contribute to your Cureus Journal Series honors progress.