Archives des mots-clés : biomedical research

Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

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Authors : Jedidiah Carlson, Kelley Harris

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities.

By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts.

In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter.

We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure.

We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies.

Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint.

These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.

URL : Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000860

Publication by association: the Covid-19 pandemic reveals relationships between authors and editors

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

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rush to scientific and political judgments 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.

URL : Publication by association: the Covid-19 pandemic reveals relationships between authors and editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/64u3s

Quantifying professionalism in peer review

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Authors : Travis G. Gerwing, Alyssa M. Allen Gerwing, Stephanie Avery-Gomm, Chi-Yeung Choi, Jeff C. Clements, Joshua A. Rash

Background

The process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.

Methods

We evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators.

Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.

Results

Overall, 12% (179) of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% (611) contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques (IIUC).

Conclusions

The large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review.

URL : Quantifying professionalism in peer review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-020-00096-x

Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

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Authors : Lucía Echevarría, Alberto Malerba, Virginia Arechavala-Gomeza

Scientific advance is based on reproducibility, corroboration, and availability of research results. However, large numbers of experimental results that contradict previous work do not get published and many research results are not freely available as they are hidden behind paywalls.

As part of COST Action “DARTER”, a network of researchers in the field of RNA therapeutics, we have performed a small survey among our members and their colleagues to assess their opinion on the subject of publishing contradictory or ambiguous results and their attitude to open access (OA) publishing.

Our survey indicates that, although researchers highly value publication of “negative” results, they often do not publish their own, citing lack of time and the perception that those results may not be as highly cited. OA, on the other hand, seems to be widely accepted, but in many cases not actively sought by researchers due to higher costs associated with it.

URL : Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1089/nat.2020.0865

International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

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Authors : Richard J Abdill, Elizabeth M Adamowicz, Ran Blekhman

Preprints are becoming well established in the life sciences, but relatively little is known about the demographics of the researchers who post preprints and those who do not, or about the collaborations between preprint authors.

Here, based on an analysis of 67,885 preprints posted on bioRxiv, we find that some countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, are overrepresented on bioRxiv relative to their overall scientific output, while other countries (including China, Russia, and Turkey) show lower levels of bioRxiv adoption.

We also describe a set of ‘contributor countries’ (including Uganda, Croatia and Thailand): researchers from these countries appear almost exclusively as non-senior authors on international collaborations.

Lastly, we find multiple journals that publish a disproportionate number of preprints from some countries, a dynamic that almost always benefits manuscripts from the US.

URL :  International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58496

Evaluation of untrustworthy journals: Transition from formal criteria to a complex view

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Authors : Jiří Kratochvíl, Lukáš Plch, Martin Sebera, Eva Koriťáková

Not all the journals included in credible indexes meet the ethical rules of COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAMEand equally there may be trustworthy journals excluded from these indexes which means they cannot be used as definitive whitelists for trustworthy journals.

Equally the many methods suggested to determine trustworthiness are not reliable due to including questionable criteria. The question arises whether valid criteria for identifying an untrustworthy journal can be determined and whether other assessment procedures are necessary.

Since 2017, the Masaryk University Campus Library has been developing a suitable evaluation method for journals. A list of 19 criteria based on those originally suggested by Beall, COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME were reduced to 10 objectively verifiable criteria following two workshops with librarians.

An evaluation of 259 biomedical journals using both the list of 19 and then 10 criteria revealed that 74 journals may have been incorrectly assessed as untrustworthy using the longer list.

The most common reason for failure to comply was in the provision of sufficient editorial information and declaration of article processing charges. However our investigation revealed that no criteria can reliably identify predatory journals.

Therefore, a complex evaluation is needed combining objectively verifiable criteria with analysis of a journal’s content and knowledge of the journal’s background.

URL : https://is.muni.cz/publication/1669782/en/Kratochvil-Plch-Sebera-Koritakova/Evaluation-of-untrustworthy-journals-Transition-from-formal-criteria-to-a-complex-view

Responsible, practical genomic data sharing that accelerates research

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Authors : James Brian Byrd, Anna C. Greene, Deepashree Venkatesh Prasad, Xiaoqian Jiang, Casey S. Greene

Data sharing anchors reproducible science, but expectations and best practices are often nebulous. Communities of funders, researchers and publishers continue to grapple with what should be required or encouraged.

To illuminate the rationales for sharing data, the technical challenges and the social and cultural challenges, we consider the stakeholders in the scientific enterprise. In biomedical research, participants are key among those stakeholders.

Ethical sharing requires considering both the value of research efforts and the privacy costs for participants. We discuss current best practices for various types of genomic data, as well as opportunities to promote ethical data sharing that accelerates science by aligning incentives.

URL : Responsible, practical genomic data sharing that accelerates research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-020-0257-5