Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

The pandemic and changes in early career researchers’ career prospects, research and publishing practices

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Authors : Hamid R. Jamali, David Nicholas, David Sims, Anthony Watkinson, Eti Herman, Cherifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Blanca Rodrıguez-Bravo, Marzena Świgoń, Abdullah Abrizah, Jie Xu, Carol Tenopir , Suzie Allard

Introduction

As part of the Harbnger-2 project, this study aimed to discover the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on junior researchers’ work-life, career prospects, research and publishing practices and networking.

Methods

An online international survey of 800 early career researchers (ECRs) was conducted in 2022. A questionnaire was developed based on three rounds of interviews and distributed using multiple channels including publishers, social media, and direct email to ECRs.

Results

The impact of the pandemic on career prospects, morale, job security, productivity, ability to network and collaborate, and quality and speed of peer review has on the whole been more negative than positive.

A quarter of ECRs shifted their research focus to pandemic-related topics and half of those who did, benefited largely due to increased productivity and impact. The majority worked remotely/from home and more than two-thirds of those who did so benefitted from it. While virtual or hybrid conferences have been embraced by the majority of ECRs, around a third still preferred face-to-face only conferences.

The use of library online platforms, Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, Google Scholar and smartphone to search and access full-text papers increased. ECRs prioritised journals with fast submission procedures for the publishing of their papers and spent more time on increasing the visibility of their research. Fees were a problem for publishing open access.

Conclusion

Although, generally, the pandemic negatively impacted many aspects of ECRs’ work-life, certain research areas and individuals benefited from being more appreciated and valued, and, in some cases, resulted in increased resources, better productivity and greater impact.

Changes, such as the use of digital technologies and remote working created new opportunities for some ECRs. While continuing work flexibility and hybrid conferences might benefit some ECRs, institutions should also take measures to help those ECRs whose career and productivity have been adversely impacted.

URL : The pandemic and changes in early career researchers’ career prospects, research and publishing practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281058

Exploring enablers and barriers to implementing the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines: a theory-based survey of journal editors

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Authors : Kevin Naaman, Sean Grant, Sina Kianersi, Lauren Supplee, Beate Henschel, Evan Mayo-Wilson

The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines provide a framework to help journals develop open science policies. Theories of behaviour change can guide understanding of why journals do (not) implement open science policies and the development of interventions to improve these policies.

In this study, we used the Theoretical Domains Framework to survey 88 journal editors on their capability, opportunity and motivation to implement TOP. Likert-scale questions assessed editor support for TOP, and enablers and barriers to implementing TOP.

A qualitative question asked editors to provide reflections on their ratings. Most participating editors supported adopting TOP at their journal (71%) and perceived other editors in their discipline to support adopting TOP (57%). Most editors (93%) agreed their roles include maintaining policies that reflect current best practices.

However, most editors (74%) did not see implementing TOP as a high priority compared with other editorial responsibilities. Qualitative responses expressed structural barriers to implementing TOP (e.g. lack of time, resources and authority to implement changes) and varying support for TOP depending on study type, open science standard, and level of implementation.

We discuss how these findings could inform the development of theoretically guided interventions to increase open science policies, procedures and practices.

URL : Exploring enablers and barriers to implementing the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines: a theory-based survey of journal editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221093

Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

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Authors : Zehra Taşkın, Franciszek Krawczyk, Emanuel Kulczycki

This study uses content-based citation analysis to move beyond the simplified classification of predatory journals. We present that, when we analyze papers not only in terms of the quantity of their citations but also the content of these citations, we are able to show the various roles played by papers published in journals accused of being predatory.

To accomplish this, we analyzed the content of 9,995 citances (i.e., citation sentences) from 6,706 papers indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, which cites papers published in so-called “predatory” (or questionable) journals. The analysis revealed that the vast majority of such citances are neutral (97.3%), and negative citations of articles published in the analyzed journals are almost completely nonexistent (0.8%).

Moreover, the analysis revealed that the most frequently mentioned countries in the citances are India, Pakistan, and Iran, with mentions of Western countries being rare. This highlights a geopolitical bias and shows the usefulness of looking at such journals as mislocated centers of scholarly communication.

The analyzed journals provide regional data prevalent for mainstream scholarly discussions, and the idea of predatory publishing hides geopolitical inequalities in global scholarly publishing. Our findings also contribute to the further development of content-based citation analysis.

URL : Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00242

Researchers and their data: A study based on the use of the word data in scholarly articles

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Authors : Frédérique Bordignon, Marion Maisonobe

Data is one of the most used terms in scientific vocabulary. This article focuses on the relationship between data and research by analyzing the contexts of occurrence of the word data in a corpus of 72,471 research articles (1980–2012) from two distinct fields (Social sciences, Physical sciences).

The aim is to shed light on the issues raised by research on data, namely the difficulty of defining what is considered as data, the transformations that data undergo during the research process, and how they gain value for researchers who hold them.

Relying on the distribution of occurrences throughout the texts and over time, it demonstrates that the word data mostly occurs at the beginning and end of research articles. Adjectives and verbs accompanying the noun data turn out to be even more important than data itself in specifying data.

The increase in the use of possessive pronouns at the end of the articles reveals that authors tend to claim ownership of their data at the very end of the research process. Our research demonstrates that even if data-handling operations are increasingly frequent, they are still described with imprecise verbs that do not reflect the complexity of these transformations.

URL : Researchers and their data: A study based on the use of the word data in scholarly articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00220

How do journals deal with problematic articles. Editorial response of journals to articles commented in PubPeer

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Authors : José-Luis Ortega, Lorena Delgado-Quirós

The aim of this article is to explore the editorial response of journals to research articles that may contain methodological errors or misconduct. A total of 17,244 articles commented on in PubPeer, a post-publication peer review site, were processed and classified according to several error and fraud categories.

Then, the editorial response (i.e., editorial notices) to these papers were retrieved from PubPeer, Retraction Watch, and PubMed to obtain the most comprehensive picture. The results show that only 21.5% of the articles that deserve an editorial notice (i.e., honest errors, methodological flaws, publishing fraud, manipulation) were corrected by the journal. This percentage would climb to 34% for 2019 publications.

This response is different between journals, but cross-sectional across all disciplines. Another interesting result is that high-impact journals suffer more from image manipulations, while plagiarism is more frequent in low-impact journals.

The study concludes with the observation that the journals have to improve their response to problematic articles.

URL : How do journals deal with problematic articles. Editorial response of journals to articles commented in PubPeer

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2023.ene.18

The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries

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Author : C. Sean Burns

Science depends on a communication system, and today, that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite the fact that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for this communication system, peer-reviewed journals continue to mimic workflows and processes from the print era.

This paper focuses on one artifact from the print era, the journal issue, and describes how this artifact has been detrimental to the communication of science, and therefore, to science itself.

To replace the journal issue, this paper argues that scholarly publishing and journals could more fully embrace digital technologies by creating digital libraries to present and organize scholarly output.

URL : The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11010007

The APC-Barrier and its effect on stratification in open access publishing

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Authors : Thomas Klebel, Tony Ross-Hellauer

Current implementations of Open Access (OA) publishing frequently involve Article Publishing Charges (APCs). Increasing evidence emerges that APCs impede researchers with fewer resources in publishing their research OA.

We analysed 1.5 million scientific articles from journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals to assess average APCs and their determinants for a comprehensive set of journal publications, across scientific disciplines, world regions and through time.

Levels of APCs were strongly stratified by scientific fields and the institutions’ countries, corroborating previous findings on publishing cultures and the impact of mandates of research funders.

After controlling for country and scientific field with a multilevel mixture model, however, we found small to moderate effects of levels of institutional resourcing on the level of APCs.

Effects were largest in countries with low GDP, suggesting decreasing marginal effects of institutional resources when general levels of funding are high. Our findings provide further evidence on how APCs stratify OA publishing and highlight the need for alternative publishing models.

URL : The APC-Barrier and its effect on stratification in open access publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00245