Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Artificial intelligence in peer review: How can evolutionary computation support journal editors?

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Authors : Maciej J. Mrowinski, Piotr Fronczak, Agata Fronczak, Marcel Ausloos, Olgica Nedic

With the volume of manuscripts submitted for publication growing every year, the deficiencies of peer review (e.g. long review times) are becoming more apparent. Editorial strategies, sets of guidelines designed to speed up the process and reduce editors workloads, are treated as trade secrets by publishing houses and are not shared publicly.

To improve the effectiveness of their strategies, editors in small publishing groups are faced with undertaking an iterative trial-and-error approach. We show that Cartesian Genetic Programming, a nature-inspired evolutionary algorithm, can dramatically improve editorial strategies.

The artificially evolved strategy reduced the duration of the peer review process by 30%, without increasing the pool of reviewers (in comparison to a typical human-developed strategy).

Evolutionary computation has typically been used in technological processes or biological ecosystems. Our results demonstrate that genetic programs can improve real-world social systems that are usually much harder to understand and control than physical systems.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01682

Digital Encyclopedia of Scientific Results

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Author : János Tapolcai

This study describes a vision, how technology can help improving the efficiency in research.

We propose a new clean-slate design, where more emphasis is given on the correctness and up-to-dateness of the scientific results, it is more open to new ideas and better utilize the research efforts worldwide by providing personalized interface for every researcher.

The key idea is to reveal the structure and connections of the problems solved in the scientific studies. We will build the system with the main focus on the solved problems itself, and treat the studies only as one presentation form.

By utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning on the network of the solved problems we could coordinate individual research activities in a large scale, that has never been seen before.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10172

Grey literature publishing in public policy: production and management, costs and benefits

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Author : Amanda Lawrence

Public policy and practice, and policy research, relies on diverse forms and types of information and communication, both traditional publications and a myriad of other documents and resources including reports, briefings, legislation, discussion papers, submissions and evaluations and much more.sci

This is sometimes referred to as ‘grey literature’, a collective term for the wide range of publications produced and published directly by organisations, either in print or digitally, outside of the commercial or scholarly publishing industry.

In the digital era grey literature has proliferated, and has become a key tool in influencing public debate and in providing an evidence-base for public policy and practice. Despite its ubiquity and influence, grey literature’s role is often overlooked as a publishing phenomenon, ignored both in scholarly research on media and communications and in the debate on the changing nature of open access and academic publishing.

This paper looks at the production of grey literature for public policy and practice where the changes enabled by computers and the internet are causing a hidden revolution in the dissemination of knowledge and evidence.

It explores the production, dissemination and management of publications by organizations, their nature, purpose and value, and investigates the benefits and the challenges of publishing outside of the commercial or scholarly publishing enterprises.

The paper provides estimates of the economic value of grey literature based on online surveys and valuations and considers the costs and benefits of self-publishing by organisations which provides both a dynamic, flexible and responsive publishing system and one in which link rot, duplication and highly varying standards abound.

The findings are part of a broader research project looking at role and value of grey literature for policy and practice including consumption, production and collection.

It will be of interest to a wide range of policy makers and practitioners as well as academics working in media and communications, public administration and library and information management.

URL : Grey literature publishing in public policy: production and management, costs and benefits

Alternative location : http://apo.org.au/node/121016

Preventing the ends from justifying the means: withholding results to address publication bias in peer-review

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Authors : Katherine S. Button, Liz Bal, Anna Clark, Tim Shipley

The evidence that many of the findings in the published literature may be unreliable is compelling. There is an excess of positive results, often from studies with small sample sizes, or other methodological limitations, and the conspicuous absence of null findings from studies of a similar quality.

This distorts the evidence base, leading to false conclusions and undermining scientific progress. Central to this problem is a peer-review system where the decisions of authors, reviewers, and editors are more influenced by impressive results than they are by the validity of the study design.

To address this, BMC Psychology is launching a pilot to trial a new ‘results-free’ peer-review process, whereby editors and reviewers are blinded to the study’s results, initially assessing manuscripts on the scientific merits of the rationale and methods alone.

The aim is to improve the reliability and quality of published research, by focusing editorial decisions on the rigour of the methods, and preventing impressive ends justifying poor means.

URL : Preventing the ends from justifying the means: withholding results to address publication bias in peer-review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-016-0167-7

Understanding the Changing Roles of Scientific Publications via Citation Embeddings

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Authors : Jiangen He, Chaomei Chen

Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication.

In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing and complex roles of a publication characterized by its citation context. We described a method to represent the publications’ dynamic roles in science community in different periods as a sequence of vectors by training temporal embedding models.

The temporal representations can be used to quantify how much the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed.

Our study in the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publications’ roles is stable over time at the population level but significantly distinguish individuals. We also show the interpretability of our methods by a concrete example.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05822

A review of data sharing statements in observational studies published in the BMJ: A cross-sectional study

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Authors : Laura McDonald, Anna Schultze, Alex Simpson, Sophie Graham, Radek Wasiak, Sreeram V. Ramagopalan

In order to understand the current state of data sharing in observational research studies, we reviewed data sharing statements of observational studies published in a general medical journal, the British Medical Journal.

We found that the majority (63%) of observational studies published between 2015 and 2017 included a statement that implied that data used in the study could not be shared. If the findings of our exploratory study are confirmed, room for improvement in the sharing of real-world or observational research data exists.

URL : A review of data sharing statements in observational studies published in the BMJ: A cross-sectional study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12673.2

Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts

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Authors : Jimmy Ghaphery, Sam Byrd, Hillary Miller

INTRODUCTION

There is a growing body of accepted author manuscripts (AAMs) in national, professional, and institutional repositories. This study seeks to explore librarian attitudes about AAMs and in what contexts they should be recommended.

Particular attention is paid to differences between the attitudes of librarians whose primary job responsibilities are within the field of scholarly communications as opposed to the rest of the profession.

METHODS

An Internet survey was sent to nine different professional listservs, asking for voluntary anonymous participation.

RESULTS

This study finds that AAMs are considered an acceptable source by many librarians, with scholarly communications librarians more willing to recommend AAMs in higher-stakes contexts such as health care and dissertation research.

DISCUSSION

Librarian AAM attitudes are discussed, with suggestions for future research and implications for librarians.

URL : Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2204