Étiquette : scientific communication

Catégories
EN

The persistence of error: a study of retracted articles on the Internet and in personal libraries

Objective

To determine the accessibility of retracted articles residing on non-publisher websites and in personal libraries.

Methods

Searches were performed to locate Internet copies of 1,779 retracted articles identified in MEDLINE, published between 1973 and 2010, excluding the publishers’ website. Found copies were classified by article version and location. Mendeley (a bibliographic software) was searched for copies residing in personal libraries.

Results

Non-publisher websites provided 321 publicly accessible copies for 289 retracted articles: 304 (95%) copies were the publisher’ versions, and 13 (4%) were final manuscripts. PubMed Central had 138 (43%) copies; educational websites 94 (29%); commercial websites 24 (7%); advocacy websites 16 (5%); and institutional repositories 10 (3%). Just 15 (5%) full-article views included a retraction statement. Personal Mendeley libraries contained records for 1,340 (75%) retracted articles, shared by 3.4 users, on average.

Conclusions

The benefits of decentralized access to scientific articles may come with the cost of promoting incorrect, invalid, or untrustworthy science. Automated methods to deliver status updates to readers may reduce the persistence of error in the scientific literature. »

URL : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411255/

Catégories
Non classé

Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use…

Preliminary survey of leading general medicine journals’ use of Facebook and Twitter :

« Aim: This study is the first to chart the use of Facebook and Twitter by peer-reviewed medical journals.

Methods: We selected the top 25 general medicine journals on the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report (JCR) list. We surveyed their Facebook and Twitter presences and scanned their Web sites for any Facebook and (or) Twitter features as of November 2011.

Results/Discussion: 20 of 25 journals had some sort of Facebook presence, with 11 also having a Twitter presence. Total ‘Likes’ across all of the Facebook pages for journals with a Facebook presence were 321,997, of which 259, 902 came from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) alone. The total numbers of Twitter ‘Followers’ were smaller by comparison when compiled across all surveyed journals. ‘Likes’ and ‘Followers’ are not the equivalents of total accesses but provide some proxy measure for impact and popularity. Those journals in our sample making best use of the open sharing nature of social media are closed-access; with the leading open access journals on the list lagging behind by comparison. We offer a partial interpretation for this and discuss other findings of our survey, provide some recommendations to journals wanting to use social media, and finally present some future research directions.

Conclusions: Journals should not underestimate the potential of social media as a powerful means of reaching out to their readership. »

URL : http://pubs.chla-absc.ca/doi/full/10.5596/c2012-010

Catégories
Non classé

Towards a Book Publishers Citation Reports First approach…

Towards a Book Publishers Citation Reports. First approach using the Book Citation Index :

« The absence of books and book chapters in the Web of Science Citation Indexes (SCI, SSCI and A&HCI) has always been considered an important flaw but the Thomson Reuters ‘Book Citation Index’ database was finally available in October of 2010 indexing 29,618 books and 379,082 book chapters. The Book Citation Index opens a new window of opportunities for analyzing these fields from a bibliometric point of view. The main objective of this article is to analyze different impact indicators referred to the scientific publishers included in the Book Citation Index for the Social Sciences and Humanities fields during 2006-2011. This way we construct what we have called the ‘Book Publishers Citation Reports’. For this, we present a total of 19 rankings according to the different disciplines in Humanities & Arts and Social Sciences & Law with six indicators for scientific publishers »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7067

Catégories
EN

Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact

Authors : Bo-Christer Björk, David Solomon

Background

In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk.

Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.

Methods

The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model.

Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich’s periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal.

A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.

Results

Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996.

OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/73

Catégories
Non classé

Software systems for increasing availability of scientific research…

Software systems for increasing availability of scientific-research outputs :

« This paper describes the basic approaches for publishing scientic-research outputs using modern ICT technologies and web applications such as institutional repositories, the NDLTD, and CRIS. Also, the CRIS which has been developed at the University of Novi Sad is described. That system unies the mentioned approaches and it is compatible with all of them. »

URL : http://www.dmi.rs/NSJOM/Papers/42_1/NSJOM_42_1_037_048.pdf

Catégories
Non classé

Scholar publications and open access policies the Ktisis…

Scholar publications and open access policies: the Ktisis case :

« Throughout the world, academic libraries have come to the conclusion that the development of institutional repositories must be one of their major goals. Institutional repositories are the means for libraries to provide access to the research product of the academic community and also to promote open access. The publication of the research results in open access journals assists in the global diffusion of this information. The open access movement is becoming very popular among the academic institutions. Today more than 320 organizations have signed the Berlin declaration on Open Access. The Library and Information Services at the Cyprus University of Technology is one of these organizations. By signing this declaration the University commits to promote and support Open Access encouraging the researchers to publish their work based on the Open Access policies. The Library has developed the first institutional repository in Cyprus, Ktisis. This paper briefly describes the implementation process of Ktisis and continues to examine the set of activities used in the strategic plan of Ktisis, including the definition of open access policies. »

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/17314

Catégories
Non classé

High reprint orders in medical journals and pharmaceutical…

High reprint orders in medical journals and pharmaceutical industry funding: case-control study :

« Reprints of published articles are a potential valuable means of disseminating information. Many individuals and organisations may request reprints, including the authors of the articles themselves, other members of the scientific community, study sponsors, and pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is thought to be the largest purchaser of reprints. After gifts and drug samples, reprints are the most common form of promotional material circulated among doctors by pharmaceutical companies.

Because pharmaceutical companies may buy from journals copies of articles they have funded, reprints of published articles have been suggested as a possible source of conflict of interest that could lead to publication bias. Orders can be worth large sums of money and could potentially influence the chance of a paper being accepted, especially with the current organisational framework, under which editors can be responsible for the journal’s content and its finances. Studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are also more likely to be published in higher impact factor journals than are studies without industry funding.

Data on the numbers of reprints ordered are scarce. One study examined the characteristics of articles published in the Lancet in 1998 in the top 21 of reprint orders and compared these with a set of control articles from the same journal. Reprint orders were not reported in detail, but less than 25% were stated to concern over 100 000 copies. Studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry were marginally significantly over-represented in the high reprint group compared with the control articles. Using more recent data we report the number of reprints ordered for the top articles by reprint order in medical journals, identify the sponsors and designs of these studies, and quantify the possible financial implications for journals. »

URL : http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e4212