Archives des catégories : EN

Virtual conferences raise standards for accessibility and interactions

Posté le par

Author : Sarvenaz Sarabipour

Scientific conferences have an important role in the exchange of ideas and knowledge within the scientific community. Conferences also provide early-career researchers with opportunities to make themselves known within their field of research.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has brought traditional in-person conferences to a halt for the foreseeable future, the growth of virtual conferences has highlighted many of the disadvantages associated with the in-person format and demonstrated the advantages of moving these events online.

Here, based on data from in-person and virtual conferences in a range of subjects, we describe how virtual conferences are more inclusive, more affordable, less time-consuming and more accessible worldwide, especially for early-career researchers.

Making conferences more open and inclusive will provide both immediate and long-term benefits to the scientific community.

URL : Virtual conferences raise standards for accessibility and interactions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62668

A metaresearch study revealed susceptibility of Covid-19 treatment research to white hat bias: first, do no harm

Posté le par

Author : Ioannis Bellos

Objective

To investigate the presence of white hat bias in Covid-19 treatment research by evaluating the effects of citation and reporting bias.

Study design and setting

Citation bias was investigated by assessing the degree of agreement between evidence provided by a remdesivir randomized controlled trial and its citing articles. The dissimilarity of outcomes derived from nonrandomized and randomized studies was tested by a meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine effects on mortality. The differential influence of studies with beneficial over those with neutral results was evaluated by a bibliometric analysis.

Results

The articles citing the ACTT-1 remdesivir trial preferentially presented its positive outcomes in 55.83% and its negative outcomes in 6.43% of cases. The hydroxychloroquine indicated no significant effect by randomized studies, but a significant survival benefit by nonrandomized ones.

Citation mapping revealed that the study reporting survival benefit from the hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin combination was the most influential, despite subsequent studies reporting potential harmful effects.

Conclusion

The present study raises concerns about citation bias and a predilection of reporting beneficial over harmful effects in the Covid-19 treatment research, potentially in the context of white hat bias. Preregistration, data sharing and avoidance of selective reporting are crucial to ensure the credibility of future research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.03.020

Open science reforms: Strengths, challenges, and future directions

Posté le par

Author : Kathryn R. Wentzel

In this article, I comment on the potential benefits and limitations of open science reforms for improving the transparency and accountability of research, and enhancing the credibility of research findings within communities of policy and practice.

Specifically, I discuss the role of replication and reproducibility of research in promoting better quality studies, the identification of generalizable principles, and relevance for practitioners and policymakers.

Second, I suggest that greater attention to theory might contribute to the impact of open science practices, and discuss ways in which theory has implications for sampling, measurement and research design.

Ambiguities concerning the aims of preregistration and registered reports also are highlighted. In conclusion, I discuss structural roadblocks to open science reform and reflect on the relevance of these reforms for educational psychology.

URL : https://edarxiv.org/sgfy8/

Fear of the academic fake? Journal editorials and the amplification of the ‘predatory publishing’ discourse

Posté le par

Authors : Kelsey Inouye, David Mills

This analysis of 229 editorials and opinion pieces published in science and medical journals explores the affective discourses used to characterise so‐called predatory publishing. Most (84%, n = 193) deploy one or more of three related categories of metaphorical and figurative language (fear, fakery and exploitation) to strengthen their rhetorical case.

This paper examines the deployment, co‐occurrence and amplification of this language across the science publishing system, focusing particularly on the role of major science journals in adopting and normalising this emotive discourse.

The analysis shows how few editorials offer alternative perspectives on these developments (n = 9), and their relative invisibility in scholarly debates.

URL : Fear of the academic fake? Journal editorials and the amplification of the ‘predatory publishing’ discourse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1377

The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

Posté le par

Authors : Ahmad Yaman Abdin, Muhammad Jawad Nasim, Yannick Ney, Claus Jacob

Scientists observe, discover, justify and eventually share their findings with the scientific community. Dissemination is an integral aspect of scientific discovery, since discoveries which go unnoticed have no or little impact on science.

Today, peer review is part of this process of scientific dissemination as it contributes proactively to the quality of a scientific article. As the numbers of scientific journals and scientific articles published therein are increasing steadily, processes such as the single-blind or double-blind peer review are facing a near collapse situation.

In fact, these traditional forms of reviewing have reached their limits and, because of this, are also increasingly considered as unfair, sloppy, superficial and even biased. In this manuscript, we propose forms of post-publication public peer review (P4R) as valuable alternatives to the traditional blind peer review system.

We describe how the journal Sci has explored such an approach and provide first empirical evidence of the benefits and also challenges, such a P4R approach faces.

URL : The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010013

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

Posté le par

Author : Raminta Pranckutė

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one.

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations.

Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place.

This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB.

URL : Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010012

Research impact evaluation and academic discourse

Posté le par

Author : Marta Natalia Wróblewska

The introduction of ‘impact’ as an element of assessment constitutes a major change in the construction of research evaluation systems. While various protocols of impact evaluation exist, the most articulated one was implemented as part of the British Research Excellence Framework (REF).

This paper investigates the nature and consequences of the rise of ‘research impact’ as an element of academic evaluation from the perspective of discourse. Drawing from linguistic pragmatics and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study discusses shifts related to the so-called Impact Agenda on four stages, in chronological order: (1) the ‘problematization’ of the notion of ‘impact’, (2) the establishment of an ‘impact infrastructure’, (3) the consolidation of a new genre of writing–impact case study, and (4) academics’ positioning practices towards the notion of ‘impact’, theorized here as the triggering of new practices of ‘subjectivation’ of the academic self.

The description of the basic functioning of the ‘discourse of impact’ is based on the analysis of two corpora: case studies submitted by a selected group of academics (linguists) to REF2014 (no = 78) and interviews (n = 25) with their authors.

Linguistic pragmatics is particularly useful in analyzing linguistic aspects of the data, while Foucault’s theory helps draw together findings from two datasets in a broader analysis based on a governmentality framework. This approach allows for more general conclusions on the practices of governing (academic) subjects within evaluation contexts.

URL : Research impact evaluation and academic discourse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00727-8