WKU News

The International Journal of Exercise Science (IJES), published in WKU’s open access digital repository TopSCHOLAR®, is now being cited in PubMed, a database of more than 27 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals and online books. PubMed also links to the full-text articles of IJES in PubMed Central® (PMC), a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

“When James Navalta and I first had the idea for the International Journal of Exercise Science, we knew we had identified a need, and thus an opportunity,” said Scott Lyons, co-editor of the IJES and Dean of the Graduate School at WKU. “There just wasn’t a student-focused, peer-reviewed journal in our discipline of which we were aware, so we thought that, over time, our journal might eventually catch on as a place for students to consider publishing their research. As a publishing platform, TopSCHOLAR® provided the perfect opportunity. We had no idea the journal would become so popular so quickly.”

Todd Seguin, Scholarly Communication Specialist for WKU Libraries, observed that IJES is the most visited community on TopSCHOLAR®.  “IJES articles are consistently among the most downloaded in TopSCHOLAR®. The journal had over 100,000 downloads last year and over half a million since inception in 2008,” said Seguin.

TopSCHOLAR®, the Research and Creative Activity Database of WKU, contains WKU faculty, staff and students’ accomplishments including graduate papers, creative writing, photographs, learning modules, original music and drama, data sets, podcasts, journals and various other scholarly works. As of May 2017 TopSCHOLAR® use exceeded 2.6 million full-text downloads from over 25,000 scholarly works. For information on TopSCHOLAR®, go to digitalcommons.wku.edu or look for TopSCHOLAR®  at wku.edu/library.

Contact: Jennifer Wilson, (270) 745-6977