Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Too much of a good thing? An observational study of prolific authors

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Introduction

Researchers’ productivity is usually measured in terms of their publication output. A minimum number of publications is required for some medical qualifications and professional appointments. However, authoring an unfeasibly large number of publications might indicate disregard of authorship criteria or even fraud. We therefore examined publication patterns of highly prolific authors in 4 medical specialties.

Methods

We analysed Medline publications from 2008–12 using bespoke software to disambiguate individual authors focusing on 4 discrete topics (to further reduce the risk of combining publications from authors with the same name and affiliation). This enabled us to assess the number and type of publications per author per year.

Results

While 99% of authors were listed on fewer than 20 publications in the 5-year period, 24 authors in the chosen areas were listed on at least 25 publications in a single year (i.e., >1 publication per 10 working days). Types of publication by the prolific authors varied but included substantial numbers of original research papers (not simply editorials or letters).

Conclusions

Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.

URL : Too much of a good thing? An observational study of prolific authors

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1154

A New Ranking Scheme for the Institutional Scientific Performance

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We propose a new performance indicator to evaluate the productivity of research institutions by their disseminated scientific papers. The new quality measure includes two principle components: the normalized impact factor of the journal in which paper was published, and the number of citations received per year since it was published. In both components, the scientific impacts are weighted by the contribution of authors from the evaluated institution.

As a whole, our new metric, namely, the institutional performance score takes into account both journal based impact and articles specific impacts. We apply this new scheme to evaluate research output performance of Turkish institutions specialized in astronomy and astrophysics in the period of 1998-2012. We discuss the implications of the new metric, and emphasize the benefits of it along with comparison to other proposed institutional performance indicators.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03713

Open Access Indicators and Scholarly Communications in Latin America

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This book is the result of a joint research and development project supported by UNESCO and undertaken in 2013 by UNESCO in partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), the Network of Scientific Journals of Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal (RedALyC), Africa Journals Online (AJOL), the Latin America Social Sciences SchoolBrazil (FLACSO-Brazil), and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). This book aims to contribute to the understanding of scholarly production, use and reach through measures that are open and inclusive. The present book is divided into two sections.

The first section presents a narrative summary of Open Access in Latin America, including a description of the major regional initiatives that are collecting and systematizing data related to Open Access scholarship, and of available data that can be used to understand the (i) growth, (ii) reach, and (iii) impact of Open Access in developing regions. The first section ends with recommendations for future activities. The second section includes in-depth case-studies with the descriptions of indicators and methodologies of peer-review journal portals SciELO and Redalyc, and a case of subject digital repository maintained by CLACSO.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/alperin2014.pdf

Alternative location : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/25122

Retraction policies of top scientific journals ranked by impact factor

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Objective

This study gathered information about the retraction policies of the top 200 scientific journals, ranked by impact factor.

Methods

Editors of the top 200 science journals for the year 2012 were contacted by email.

Results

One hundred forty-seven journals (74%) responded to a request for information. Of these, 95 (65%) had a retraction policy. Of journals with a retraction policy, 94% had a policy that allows the editors to retract articles without authors’ consent.

Conclusions

The majority of journals in this sample had a retraction policy, and almost all of them would retract an article without the authors’ permission.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511053/

Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication

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Publishing scholarly articles in traditional and newly-launched journals is a responsible task, requiring diligence from authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics. Over the past few years, numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened to change the landscape of evidence-based science.

 

Authors, reviewers, editors, established publishers, and learned associations should be informed about predatory publishing practices and contribute to the trustworthiness of scholarly publications. In line with this, there have been several attempts to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate journals by blacklisting unethical journals (the Jeffrey Beall’s list), issuing a statement on transparency and best publishing practices (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association’s and other global organizations’ draft document), and tightening the indexing criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals. None of these measures alone turned to be sufficient. All stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles.

 

 

You are invited to submit…

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The academic community is under great pressure to publish. This pressure is compounded by high rejection rates at many journals. A more recent trend is for some journals to send invitations directly to researchers inviting them to submit a manuscript to their journals. Many researchers find these invitations annoying and unsure how best to respond to them. We collected electronic invitations to submit a manuscript to a journal between April 1, 2014, and March 31, 2015.

We analyzed their content and cross-tabulated them against journals listed in Beall’s list of potential predatory journals. During this time period, 311 invitations were received for 204 journals, the majority of which were in Beall’s list (n = 244; 79 %). The invitations came throughout the calendar year and some journals sent up to six invitations. The majority of journals claimed to provide peer review (n = 179; 57.6 %) although no mention was made of expedited review process. Similarly, more than half of the journals claimed to be open access (n = 186; 59.8 %). The majority of invitations included an unsubscribe link (n = 187; 60.1 %). About half of the invitations came from biomedical journals (n = 179).

We discuss strategies researchers and institutions can consider to reduce the number of invitations received and strategies to handle those invitations that make it to the recipients’ inbox, thus helping to maintain the credibility and reputation of researchers and institutions.

URL : You are invited to submit…

Related URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/180

Les revues de sciences humaines et sociales en France: libre accès et audience

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“La Commission européenne a émis le 17 juillet 2012 une recommandation en faveur du libre accès aux résultats de la recherche financée sur fonds publics.

La question posée aux politiques publiques est celle de la durée pendant laquelle l’accès peut être payant avant le passage à la gratuité de l’article. Il s’agit donc de prendre la mesure des gains et des coûts d’une telle politique de libre accès pour déterminer quel serait le délai optimal d’embargo.”

URL : http://www.ipp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/revues-shs-rapport-IPP-juillet2015.pdf