Archives des mots-clés : Ethics

Peer Review in Law Journals

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Authors : Jadranka Stojanovski, Elías Sanz-Casado, Tommaso Agnoloni, Ginevra Peruginelli

The field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. External and independent evaluation of submissions has recently become adopted by European law journals, and peer review procedures are still poorly defined, investigated, and attuned to the legal science publishing landscape.

The aim of our study was to gain a better insight into current editorial policies on peer review in law journals by exploring editorial documents (instructions, guidelines, policies) issued by 119 Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals.

We relied on automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available documents collected from the journal websites to analyze the basic features of the peer review processes, manuscript evaluation criteria, and related ethical issues using WordStat.

Differences in covered topics between the countries were compared using the chi-square test. Our findings reveal that most law journals have adopted a traditional approach, in which the editorial board manages mostly anonymized peer review (104, 77%) engaging independent/external reviewers (65, 48%).

Submissions are evaluated according to their originality and relevance (113, 84%), quality of writing and presentation (94, 70%), comprehensiveness of literature references (93, 69%), and adequacy of methods (57, 42%).

The main ethical issues related to peer review addressed by these journals are reviewer’s competing interests (42, 31%), plagiarism (35, 26%), and biases (30, 22%). We observed statistically significant differences between countries in mentioning key concepts such as “Peer review ethics”, “Reviewer”, “Transparency of identities”, “Publication type”, and “Research misconduct”.

Spanish journals favor reviewers’ “Independence” and “Competence” and “Anonymized” peer review process. Also, some manuscript types popular in one country are rarely mentioned in other countries.

Even though peer review is equally conventional in all three countries, high transparency in Croatian law journals, respect for research integrity in Spanish ones, and diversity and inclusion in Italian are promising indicators of future development.

URL : Peer Review in Law Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.787768

Investigating the process of ethical approval in citizen science research: the case of Public Health

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Authors : Antonella Ficorilli, Giovanni Maccani, Mara Balestrini, Annibale Biggeri, Bruna De Marchi, Frederique E. M. Froeling, Florence Gignac, Regina Grazuleviciene, Gerard Hoek, Tjaša Kanduč, David Kocman, Valeria Righi, Xavier Basagana

Undertaking citizen science research in Public Health involving human subjects poses significant challenges concerning the traditional process of ethical approval.

It requires an extension of the ethics of protection of research subjects in order to include the empowerment of citizens as citizen scientists.

This paper investigates these challenges and illustrates the ethical framework and the strategies developed within the CitieS-Health project. It also proposes first recommendations generated from the experiences of five citizen science pilot studies in environmental epidemiology within this project.

URL : Investigating the process of ethical approval in citizen science research: the case of Public Health

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.20060204

Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

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Authors : Raffaella Ravinetto, Céline Caillet, Muhammad H. Zaman, Jerome Amir Singh, Philippe J. Guerin, Aasim Ahmad, Carlos E. Durán, Amar Jesani, Ana Palmero, Laura Merson, Peter W. Horby, E. Bottieau, Tammy Hoffmann, Paul N. Newton

Over recent years, the research community has been increasingly using preprint servers to share manuscripts that are not yet peer-reviewed. Even if it enables quick dissemination of research findings, this practice raises several challenges in publication ethics and integrity.

In particular, preprints have become an important source of information for stakeholders interested in COVID19 research developments, including traditional media, social media, and policy makers.

Despite caveats about their nature, many users can still confuse pre-prints with peer-reviewed manuscripts. If unconfirmed but already widely shared first-draft results later prove wrong or misinterpreted, it can be very difficult to “unlearn” what we thought was true. Complexity further increases if unconfirmed findings have been used to inform guidelines.

To help achieve a balance between early access to research findings and its negative consequences, we formulated five recommendations: (a) consensus should be sought on a term clearer than ‘pre-print’, such as ‘Unrefereed manuscript’, “Manuscript awaiting peer review” or ‘’Non-reviewed manuscript”; (b) Caveats about unrefereed manuscripts should be prominent on their first page, and each page should include a red watermark stating ‘Caution—Not Peer Reviewed’; (c) pre-print authors should certify that their manuscript will be submitted to a peer-review journal, and should regularly update the manuscript status; (d) high level consultations should be convened, to formulate clear principles and policies for the publication and dissemination of non-peer reviewed research results; (e) in the longer term, an international initiative to certify servers that comply with good practices could be envisaged.

URL : Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-021-00667-7

Integrating Qualitative Methods and Open Science: Five Principles for More Trustworthy Research

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Authors : Lee Humphreys, Neil A Lewis Jr, Katherine Sender, Andrea Stevenson Won

Recent initiatives toward open science in communication have prompted vigorous debate. In this article, we draw on qualitative and interpretive research methods to expand the key priorities that the open science framework addresses, namely producing trustworthy and quality research.

This article contributes to communication research by integrating qualitative methodological literature with open communication science research to identify five broader commitments for all communication research: validity, transparency, ethics, reflexivity, and collaboration.

We identify key opportunities where qualitative and quantitative communication scholars can leverage the momentum of open science to critically reflect on and improve our knowledge production processes.

We also examine competing values that incentivize dubious practices in communication research, and discuss several metascience initiatives to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field and value multiple ways of knowing.

URL : Integrating Qualitative Methods and Open Science: Five Principles for More Trustworthy Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab026

Crédibilité du chercheur, relation de confiance et éthique en recherche qualitative : l’implexité à la croisée des chemins

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Auteur/Author : Bakary Doucouré

Cet article, élaboré à partir d’observations et d’expériences accumulées durant une quinzaine d’années dans le cadre de plusieurs recherches empiriques, analyse l’intérêt de la crédibilité du chercheur et de la relation de confiance dans un processus de recherche qualitative.

Il relève d’une démarche autoréflexive et introspective faisant émerger la place de l’implexité et le rôle essentiel de l’éthique dans le processus d’enquête qualitative, tout en permettant de mieux comprendre le lien entre les deux.

Aussi cet article s’inscrit de manière plus large dans les réflexions épistémologiques, méthodologiques et éthiques portant sur la recherche qualitative qui constituent des préoccupations à la fois constantes, évolutives et sans cesse renouvelées. Il est structuré autour de deux principaux axes.

D’une part, il aborde un ensemble de questions portant à la fois sur la crédibilité, la confiance, l’éthique et l’implexité, tout en indiquant des perspectives analytiques qui s’en dégagent.

D’autre part, à partir de l’analyse des données, l’article montre la relation entre l’implexité, la crédibilité et la confiance, mais aussi la dynamique de renforcement mutuel entre l’éthique et l’implexité.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1076346ar

Publication by association: how the COVID-19 pandemic has shown relationships between authors and editorial board members in the field of infectious diseases

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Authors : Clara Locher, David Moher, Ioana Alina Cristea, Florian Naudet

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rush to scientific and political judgements on the merits of hydroxychloroquine was fuelled by dubious papers which may have been published because the authors were not independent from the practices of the journals in which they appeared.

This example leads us to consider a new type of illegitimate publishing entity, ‘self-promotion journals’ which could be deployed to serve the instrumentalisation of productivity-based metrics, with a ripple effect on decisions about promotion, tenure and grant funding, but also on the quality of manuscripts that are disseminated to the medical community and form the foundation of evidence-based medicine.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111670

How ethics combine with big data: a bibliometric analysis

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Authors : Marta Kuc-Czarnecka, Magdalena Olczyk

The term Big Data is becoming increasingly widespread throughout the world, and its use is no longer limited to the IT industry, quantitative scientific research, and entrepreneurship, but entered as well everyday media and conversations. The prevalence of Big Data is simply a result of its usefulness in searching, downloading, collecting and processing massive datasets.

It is therefore not surprising that the number of scientific articles devoted to this issue is increasing. However, the vast majority of research papers deal with purely technical matters. Yet, large datasets coupled with complex analytical algorithms pose the risk of non-transparency, unfairness, e.g., racial or class bias, cherry-picking of data, or even intentional misleading of public opinion, including policymakers, for example by tampering with the electoral process in the context of ‘cyberwars’.

Thus, this work implements a bibliometric analysis to investigate the development of ethical concerns in the field of Big Data. The investigation covers articles obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection Database (WoS) published between 1900 and July 2020.

A sample size of 892 research papers was evaluated using HistCite and VOSviewer software. The results of this investigation shed light on the evolution of the junction of two concepts: ethics and Big Data.

In particular, the study revealed the following array of findings: the topic is relatively poorly represented in the scientific literature with the relatively slow growth of interest. In addition, ethical issues in Big Data are discussed mainly in the field of health and technology.

URL : How ethics combine with big data: a bibliometric analysis

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00638-0