Navigating the Science System: Research Integrity and Academic Survival Strategies.

Research Integrity (RI) is high on the agenda of both institutions and science policy. The European Union as well as national ministries of science have launched ambitious initiatives to combat misconduct and breaches of research integrity. Often, such initiatives entail attempts to regulate scientific behavior through guidelines that institutions and academic communities can use to more easily identify and deal with cases of misconduct. Rather than framing misconduct as a result of an information deficit, we instead conceptualize Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) as attempts by researchers to reconcile epistemic and social forms of uncertainty in knowledge production. Drawing on previous literature, we define epistemic uncertainty as the inherent intellectual unpredictability of scientific inquiry, while social uncertainty arises from the human-made conditions for scientific work. Our core argument-developed on the basis of 30 focus group interviews with researchers across different fields and European countries-is that breaches of research integrity can be understood as attempts to loosen overly tight coupling between the two forms of uncertainty. Our analytical approach is not meant to relativize or excuse misconduct, but rather to offer a more fine-grained perspective on what exactly it is that researchers want to accomplish by engaging in it. Based on the analysis, we conclude by proposing some concrete ways in which institutions and academic communities could try to reconcile epistemic and social uncertainties on a more collective level, thereby reducing incentives for researchers to engage in misconduct.

Factors influencing the promotion and implementation of research integrity in research performing and research funding organizations: A scoping review.

Promoting and implementing research integrity is considered the joint responsibility and effort of multiple stakeholders in the research community. We conducted a scoping review and analyzed 236 research articles and gray literature publications from biomedical sciences, social sciences, natural sciences (including engineering), and humanities that dealt with the factors that may positively or negatively impact the promotion and implementation of research integrity. Critical appraisal of evidence was performed for studies describing interventions aimed at research integrity promotion in order to provide insight into the effectiveness of these interventions. The results of this scoping review provide a comprehensive taxonomy of factors with positive or negative impact and their relatedness to individual researchers, research performing and funding organizations, and the system of science. Moreover, the results show that efforts for fostering and promoting research integrity should be implemented at all three levels (researcher, institution, system) simultaneously to deliver greater adherence and implementation of research integrity practices. Although various educational interventions aiming at research integrity promotion exist, we were not able to conclude on the effectiveness of explored interventions due to the methodological quality issues in the studies.

How to improve scientific peer review: Four schools of thought.

Peer review plays an essential role as one of the cornerstones of the scholarly publishing system. There are many initiatives that aim to improve the way in which peer review is organized, resulting in a highly complex landscape of innovation in peer review. Different initiatives are based on different views on the most urgent challenges faced by the peer review system, leading to a diversity of perspectives on how the system can be improved. To provide a more systematic understanding of the landscape of innovation in peer review, we suggest that the landscape is shaped by four schools of thought: The Quality & Reproducibility school, the Democracy & Transparency school, the Equity & Inclusion school, and the Efficiency & Incentives school. Each school has a different view on the key problems of the peer review system and the innovations necessary to address these problems. The schools partly complement each other, but we argue that there are also important tensions between them. We hope that the four schools of thought offer a useful framework to facilitate conversations about the future development of the peer review system.

Designing and implementing a research integrity promotion plan: Recommendations for research funders.

Various stakeholders in science have put research integrity high on their agenda. Among them, research funders are prominently placed to foster research integrity by requiring that the organizations and individual researchers they support make an explicit commitment to research integrity. Moreover, funders need to adopt appropriate research integrity practices themselves. To facilitate this, we recommend that funders develop and implement a Research Integrity Promotion Plan (RIPP). This Consensus View offers a range of examples of how funders are already promoting research integrity, distills 6 core topics that funders should cover in a RIPP, and provides guidelines on how to develop and implement a RIPP. We believe that the 6 core topics we put forward will guide funders towards strengthening research integrity policy in their organization and guide the researchers and research organizations they fund.

Changing publication practices and the typification of the journal article in science and technology studies.

In this article, we study the development of the STS journal article format since the 1980s. Our analysis is based on quantitative data that suggest that the diversity of various journal publication types has diminished over the past four decades, while the format of research articles has become increasingly typified. We contextualize these historical shifts in qualitative terms, drawing on a set of 76 interviews with STS scholars and other stakeholders in scholarly publishing. Here, we first portray the STS publication culture of the 1980s and early 1990s. We then contrast this with an analysis of publishing practices today, which are characterized by a much more structured research process that is largely organized around the production of typified journal articles. Whereas earlier studies have often emphasized the importance of rhetorical persuasion strategies as drivers in the development of scholarly communication formats, our analysis highlights a complementary and historically novel set of shaping factors, namely, increasingly quantified research (self-)assessment practices in the context of a projectification of academic life. We argue that reliance on a highly structured publication format is a distinct strategy for making STS scholarship 'doable' in the sense of facilitating the planning ability and daily conduct of research across a variety of levels - including the writing process, collaboration with peers, attracting funding, and interaction with journals. We conclude by reflecting on the advantages and downsides of the typification of journal articles for STS.

Editorial Work and the Peer Review Economy of STS Journals.

In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies (STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political-economic and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy.

An overview of innovations in the external peer review of journal manuscripts.

Background: There are currently numerous innovations in peer review and quality assurance in scholarly publishing. The Research on Research Institute conducted a programme of co-produced projects investigating these innovations. This literature review was part of one such project 'Experiments in peer review' which created an inventory and framework of peer review innovations. The aim of this literature review was to aid the development of the inventory by identifying innovations in peer review reported in the scholarly literature and by providing a summary of the different approaches. Methods: This meta-summary is based on data identified from Web of Science and Scopus limited from 2010 to 2021. A total of 247 papers were screened, with 6 review articles chosen for the focus of the literature review. Items were selected that described approaches to innovating peer review or illustrated examples.   Results: The summary of innovations are drawn from 6 review articles. The innovations are divided into three high-level categories: approaches to peer review, reviewer focussed initiatives and technology to support peer review with sub-categories of results presented in tabular form and summarised. A summary of all innovations found is also presented. Conclusions: From a simple synthesis of the review authors' conclusions, three key messages are presented: observations on current practice; authors' views on the implications of innovations in peer review; and calls for action in peer review research and practice.

Filling in the gaps: The interpretation of curricula vitae in peer review.

In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative infrastructure (the CV), and a situated evaluative practice in which the representational function of that infrastructure is itself interpreted and established. The use of CVs in peer review can be seen as a doubly comparative practice, where referees compare not only applicants (among each other or to an imagined ideal of excellence), but also their own experience-based understanding of practice and the conceptual assumptions that underpin CV categories. Empirically, we add to existing literature on peer review by drawing attention to self-correcting mechanisms in the reproduction of the scientific workforce. Conceptually, we distinguish three modalities of how the doubly comparative use of CVs can shape the assessment of applicants: calibration, branching out, and repair. The outcome of this reflexive work should not be seen as predetermined by situational pressures. In fact, bibliographic categories such as authorship of publications or performance metrics may themselves come to be problematized and reshaped in the process.