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15 octobre 2021

Open Access Publishing Probabilities Based on Gender and Authorship Structures in Vietnam

Authors : Huyen Thanh T. Nguyen, Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Tam-Tri Le, Manh-Toan Ho, Quan-Hoang Vuong

Open access (OA) publishing is beneficial for researchers to improve recognition, representation, and visibility in academia. However, few studies have been conducted for studying the association between gender and OA publishing likelihood.

Therefore, the current study explores the impacts of gender-based authorship structures on OA publishing in Vietnamese social sciences and humanities. Bayesian analysis was performed on a dataset of 3122 publications in social sciences and humanities.

We found that publications with mixed-gender authorship were most likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31–31.65%). In contrast, the likelihood of publications with the solely male or female author(s) was lower.

It is also notable that if female researcher(s) held the first-author position in an article of mixed-gender authorship, the publication would be less likely to be published under Gold Access terms (26.31% compared to 31.65% of male-first-author structure).

In addition, publications written by a solo female author (14.19%) or a group of female authors (10.72%) had lower OA publishing probabilities than those written by a solely male author(s) (17.14%).

These findings hint at the possible advantage of gender diversity and the disadvantage of gender homophily (especially female-only authorship) on OA publishing likelihood. Moreover, they show there might be some negative impacts of gender inequality on OA publishing.

As a result, the notion of gender diversity, financial and policy supports are recommended to promote the open science movement.

URL : Open Access Publishing Probabilities Based on Gender and Authorship Structures in Vietnam

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9040045

15 octobre 2021

Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases

Authors : Lutz Bornmann, Robin Haunschild, Rüdiger Mutz

Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced, which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic.

In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today.

We estimated regression models that included simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. As the comparison of various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, models with four or five segments fit the publication data best.

We demonstrated that these segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and/or political developments (e.g., Second World War).

In this study, we additionally analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields (Physical and Technical Sciences as well as Life Sciences) and the relationship of scientific and economic growth in UK.

The comparison between the two fields revealed only slight differences. The comparison of the British economic and scientific growth rates showed that the economic growth rate is slightly lower than the scientific growth rate.

URL : Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00903-w

15 octobre 2021

Do we achieve anything by teaching research integrity to starting PhD students?

Authors : Shila Abdi, Steffen Fieuws, Benoit Nemer, Kris Dierickx

Education of young researchers has been proposed as a way to promote research integrity. However, the effectiveness of research integrity education on PhD students is unknown. In a longitudinal design, we surveyed over 1000 starting PhD students from various disciplines regarding knowledge, attitude and behaviour before, immediately after and 3 months after a compulsory 3-h course given by a panel of experts.

Compared with a control group who did not follow the course, the course recipients showed significant (multivariate analysis) but modest improvements in knowledge and attitude scores immediately after the course, but not after 3 months; a prolonged impact was apparent regarding behaviour.

Moreover, the course spurred 93% of PhD students to have conversations about research integrity and 79% declared applying the content of the course. Among other interventions, formal education in research integrity may contribute to foster a climate of research integrity in academia.

URL : Do we achieve anything by teaching research integrity to starting PhD students?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00908-5

14 octobre 2021

Does double-blind peer review reduce bias? Evidence from a top computer science conference

Authors : Mengyi Sun, Jainabou Barry Danfa, Misha Teplitskiy

Peer review is essential for advancing scientific research, but there are long-standing concerns that authors’ prestige or other characteristics can bias reviewers. Double-blind peer review has been proposed as a way to reduce reviewer bias, but the evidence for its effectiveness is limited and mixed.

Here, we examine the effects of double-blind peer review by analyzing the review files of 5,027 papers submitted to a top computer science conference that changed its reviewing format from single- to double-blind in 2018.

First, we find that the scores given to the most prestigious authors significantly decreased after switching to double-blind review. However, because many of these papers were above the threshold for acceptance, the change did not affect paper acceptance significantly.

Second, the inter-reviewer disagreement increased significantly in the double-blind format.

Third, papers rejected in the single-blind format are cited more than those rejected under double-blind, suggesting that double-blind review better excludes poorer quality papers.

Lastly, an apparently unrelated change in the rating scale from 10 to 4 points likely reduced prestige bias significantly such that papers’ acceptance was affected.

These results support the effectiveness of double-blind review in reducing biases, while opening new research directions on the impact of peer-review formats.

URL : Does double-blind peer review reduce bias? Evidence from a top computer science conference

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24582

13 octobre 2021

Science rules! A qualitative study of scientists’ approaches to grant lottery

Author : Axel Philipps

Using peer review to assess the validity of research proposals has always had its fair share of critics, including a more-than-fair-share of scholars. The debate about this method of assessing these proposals now seems trivial when compared with assessing the validity for granting funding by lottery.

Some of the same scholars have suggested that the way grant lottery was being assessed has made random allocation seem even-handed, less biased and more supportive of innovative research.

But we know little of what researchers actually think about grant lottery and even less about the thoughts of those scientists who rely on funding. This paper examines scientists’ perspectives on selecting grants by ‘lots’ and how they justify their support or opposition.

How do they approach something scientifically that is, in itself, not scientific? These approaches were investigated with problem-centered interviews conducted with natural scientists in Germany.

The qualitative interviews for this paper reveal that scientists in dominated and dominating field positions are, more or less, open to the idea of giving a selection process by lots a try. Nonetheless, they are against pure randomization because from their point of view it is incompatible with scientific principles.

They rather favor a combination of grant lottery and peer review processes, assuming that only under these conditions could randomly allocated funding be an integral and legitimate part of science.

URL : Science rules! A qualitative study of scientists’ approaches to grant lottery

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaa027

13 octobre 2021

The role of metrics in peer assessments

Authors : Liv Langfeldt, Ingvild Reymert, Dag W Aksnes

Metrics on scientific publications and their citations are easily accessible and are often referred to in assessments of research and researchers. This paper addresses whether metrics are considered a legitimate and integral part of such assessments. Based on an extensive questionnaire survey in three countries, the opinions of researchers are analysed.

We provide comparisons across academic fields (cardiology, economics, and physics) and contexts for assessing research (identifying the best research in their field, assessing grant proposals and assessing candidates for positions).

A minority of the researchers responding to the survey reported that metrics were reasons for considering something to be the best research. Still, a large majority in all the studied fields indicated that metrics were important or partly important in their review of grant proposals and assessments of candidates for academic positions.

In these contexts, the citation impact of the publications and, particularly, the number of publications were emphasized. These findings hold across all fields analysed, still the economists relied more on productivity measures than the cardiologists and the physicists. Moreover, reviewers with high scores on bibliometric indicators seemed more frequently (than other reviewers) to adhere to metrics in their assessments.

Hence, when planning and using peer review, one should be aware that reviewers—in particular reviewers who score high on metrics—find metrics to be a good proxy for the future success of projects and candidates, and rely on metrics in their evaluation procedures despite the concerns in scientific communities on the use and misuse of publication metrics.

URL : The role of metrics in peer assessments

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaa032