Archives des mots-clés : neuroscience

Journal research data sharing policies: a study of highly-cited journals in neuroscience, physics, and operations research

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Authors : Antti M. Rousi, Mikael Laakso

The practices for if and how scholarly journals instruct research data for published research to be shared is an area where a lot of changes have been happening as science policy moves towards facilitating open science, and subject-specific repositories and practices are established.

This study provides an analysis of the research data sharing policies of highly-cited journals in the fields of neuroscience, physics, and operations research as of May 2019. For these 120 journals, 40 journals per subject category, a unified policy coding framework was developed to capture the most central elements of each policy, i.e. what, when, and where research data is instructed to be shared.

The results affirm that considerable differences between research fields remain when it comes to policy existence, strength, and specificity. The findings revealed that one of the most important factors influencing the dimensions of what, where and when of research data policies was whether the journal’s scope included specific data types related to life sciences which have established methods of sharing through community-endorsed public repositories.

The findings surface the future research potential of approaching policy analysis on the publisher-level as well as on the journal-level. The collected data and coding framework is provided as open data to facilitate future research and journal policy monitoring.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03467-9

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

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Authors : Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara, Danielle S. Bassett

Like many scientific disciplines, neuroscience has increasingly attempted to confront pervasive gender imbalances within the field. While much of the conversation has centered around publishing and conference participation, recent research in other fields has called attention to the prevalence of gender bias in citation practices.

Because of the downstream effects that citations can have on visibility and career advancement, understanding and eliminating gender bias in citation practices is vital for addressing inequity in a scientific community. In this study, we sought to determine whether there is evidence of gender bias in the citation practices of neuroscientists.

Utilizing data from five top neuroscience journals, we indeed find that reference lists tend to include more papers with men as first and last author than would be expected if gender was not a factor in referencing. Importantly, we show that this overcitation of men and undercitation of women is driven largely by the citation practices of men, and is increasing with time despite greater diversity in the academy.

We develop a co-authorship network to determine the degree to which homophily in researchers’ social networks explains gendered citation practices and we find that men tend to overcite other men even when their social networks are representative of the field.

We discuss possible mechanisms and consider how individual researchers might incorporate these findings into their own referencing practices.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.03.894378

The Social Structure of Consensus in Scientific Review

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Authors : Misha Teplitskiy, Daniel Acuna, Aida Elamrani-Raoult, Konrad Kording, James Evans

Personal connections between creators and evaluators of scientific works are ubiquitous, and the possibility of bias ever-present. Although connections have been shown to bias prospective judgments of (uncertain) future performance, it is unknown whether such biases occur in the much more concrete task of assessing the scientific validity of already completed work, and if so, why.

This study presents evidence that personal connections between authors and reviewers of neuroscience manuscripts are associated with biased judgments and explores the mechanisms driving the effect.

Using reviews from 7,981 neuroscience manuscripts submitted to the journal PLOS ONE, which instructs reviewers to evaluate manuscripts only on scientific validity, we find that reviewers favored authors close in the co-authorship network by ~0.11 points on a 1.0 – 4.0 scale for each step of proximity.

PLOS ONE’s validity-focused review and the substantial amount of favoritism shown by distant vs. very distant reviewers, both of whom should have little to gain from nepotism, point to the central role of substantive disagreements between scientists in different “schools of thought.”

The results suggest that removing bias from peer review cannot be accomplished simply by recusing the closely-connected reviewers, and highlight the value of recruiting reviewers embedded in diverse professional networks.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01270

Toward a new model of scientific publishing discussion…

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Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal :

“The current system of publishing in the biological sciences is notable for its redundancy, inconsistency, sluggishness, and opacity. These problems persist, and grow worse, because the peer review system remains focused on deciding whether or not to publish a paper in a particular journal rather than providing (1) a high-quality evaluation of scientific merit and (2) the information necessary to organize and prioritize the literature. Online access has eliminated the need for journals as distribution channels, so their primary current role is to provide authors with feedback prior to publication and a quick way for other researchers to prioritize the literature based on which journal publishes a paper. However, the feedback provided by reviewers is not focused on scientific merit but on whether to publish in a particular journal, which is generally of little use to authors and an opaque and noisy basis for prioritizing the literature. Further, each submission of a rejected manuscript requires the entire machinery of peer review to creak to life anew. This redundancy incurs delays, inconsistency, and increased burdens on authors, reviewers, and editors. Finally, reviewers have no real incentive to review well or quickly, as their performance is not tracked, let alone rewarded. One of the consistent suggestions for modifying the current peer review system is the introduction of some form of post-publication reception, and the development of a marketplace where the priority of a paper rises and falls based on its reception from the field (see other articles in this special topics). However, the information that accompanies a paper into the marketplace is as important as the marketplace’s mechanics. Beyond suggestions concerning the mechanisms of reception, we propose an update to the system of publishing in which publication is guaranteed, but pre-publication peer review still occurs, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their work following a mini pre-reception from the field. This step also provides a consistent set of rankings and reviews to the marketplace, allowing for early prioritization and stabilizing its early dynamics. We further propose to improve the general quality of reviewing by providing tangible rewards to those who do it well.”
URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00055/full