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This systematic review aims to identify the countries most active in combatting predatory journals and their definitions of such practices. It also seeks to assess awareness within academic communities, examine the impact of predatory journals on research quality and integrity, and compile existing policies to mitigate their negative effects and strengthen global scholarly integrity. A systematic search was performed in the PubMed, Scopus, and Embase databases on February 7, 2024, in line with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The focus was solely on identifying studies that examined the unique experiences and interventions associated with predatory journals in distinct national contexts. The analysis included a presentation of quantitative results and a thematic examination of qualitative data. A total of 40 articles covering 19 countries were included. Twenty-four countries (60%) were in Asia, 11 (27.5%) in Africa, two (5%) in Europe, and one (2.5%) each in Australia, North America, and South America. Although not all articles cited Beall's list to identify predatory journals, the thematic analysis showed consistent topics across various definitions and Beall's themes. Our analysis identified factors affecting academic publishing perceptions globally, highlighting publication pressure, predatory practices, and policy impacts on ethics and standards. This systematic review examined the literature on predatory publishing and identified the leading countries in the fight against these predatory publications. This analysis underscores a complex interplay of factors affecting academic publishing globally, from the push towards predatory journals as a response to publishing pressures, to the critical role of government and institutional frameworks.
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Chemistry is a reproducible science whose pillars - synthesis and analysis - actually comprise a huge collection of highly reproducible experimental methods to synthesize and analyze substances. The historical development of chemistry, furthermore, shows that reproducibility of methods has been the companion of novelty and creative innovation. The "publish or perish" principle dominating global academia since over two decades, however, intrinsically contributes to the publication of non-reproducible research outcomes also in chemistry. A study on reproducibility of chemistry research seems therefore timely, especially now that chemists are slowly but inevitably adopting open science and its tools such as the preprint, open access, and data sharing. We conclude presenting three simple guidelines for enhanced publication of research findings in chemistry.
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When deciding which submissions should be peer reviewed, eLife editors consider whether they will be able to find high-quality reviewers, and whether the reviews will be valuable to the scientific community.
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Revisão da Pesquisa por Pares , Políticas Editoriais , Publicações Periódicas como Assunto , Revisão por Pares/normas , HumanosRESUMO
While scientific researchers often aim for high productivity, prioritizing the quantity of publications may come at the cost of time and effort dedicated to individual research. It is thus important to examine the relationship between productivity and disruption for individual researchers. Here, we show that with the increase in the number of published papers, the average citation per paper will be higher yet the mean disruption of papers will be lower. In addition, we find that the disruption of scientists' papers may decrease when they are highly productive in a given year. The disruption of papers in each year is not determined by the total number of papers published in the author's career, but rather by the productivity of that particular year. Besides, more productive authors also tend to give references to recent and high-impact research. Our findings highlight the potential risks of pursuing productivity and aim to encourage more thoughtful career planning among scientists.
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Editoração , Pesquisadores , Editoração/estatística & dados numéricos , Humanos , Eficiência , Fator de Impacto de Revistas , BibliometriaRESUMO
Bullying and misconduct in the realm of scientific and scholarly publishing have the potential to jeopardize the transparency and integrity of academic discourse. While misconduct issues among authors have been extensively discussed, the role of editors in perpetuating or mitigating such problems has garnered less attention. Scientific publishing serves as the gateway for disseminating innovative research findings globally, and the role of editors, especially Editor/s-in-chief, is pivotal in safeguarding the rigor and credibility of published research. Editor bullying and misconduct involve behaviors that undermine the scientific process, compromise research integrity, and harm the careers and wellbeing of individuals. These actions may manifest as biased decision-making, suppression of dissenting voices, or the exploitation of power dynamics in the peer review process. To address these issues, preventive and therapeutic approaches are suggested, including enhancing awareness, recognizing and mitigating exacerbating factors, and upholding professionalism. Moreover, the importance of a conflict-of-interest declaration for editors is highlighted to ensure transparency and integrity in the editorial process. The present mini-review aims to shed light on editor bullying, illuminating its gravity and the urgency to address these issues within the academic publishing domain/s. This review underscores the more subtle, yet equally significant, issue of professional misconduct in the editorial realm of scientific journals.
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What happened when eLife decided to eliminate accept/reject decisions after peer review?
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Revisão da Pesquisa por Pares , Revisão por ParesRESUMO
OBJECTIVES: To assess whether ChatGPT can help to identify predatory biomedical and dental journals, analyze the content of its responses and compare the frequency of positive and negative indicators provided by ChatGPT concerning predatory and legitimate journals. METHODS: Four-hundred predatory and legitimate biomedical and dental journals were selected from four sources: Beall's list, unsolicited emails, the Web of Science (WOS) journal list and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). ChatGPT was asked to determine journal legitimacy. Journals were classified into legitimate or predatory. Pearson's Chi-squared test and logistic regression were conducted. Two machine learning algorithms determined the most influential criteria on the correct classification of journals. RESULTS: The data were categorized under 10 criteria with the most frequently coded criteria being the transparency of processes and policies. ChatGPT correctly classified predatory and legitimate journals in 92.5 % and 71 % of the sample, respectively. The accuracy of ChatGPT responses was 0.82. ChatGPT also demonstrated a high level of sensitivity (0.93). Additionally, the model exhibited a specificity of 0.71, accurately identifying true negatives. A highly significant association between ChatGPT verdicts and the classification based on known sources was observed (P <0.001). ChatGPT was 30.2 times more likely to correctly classify a predatory journal (95 % confidence interval: 16.9-57.43, p-value: <0.001). CONCLUSIONS: ChatGPT can accurately distinguish predatory and legitimate journals with a high level of accuracy. While some false positive (29 %) and false negative (7.5 %) results were observed, it may be reasonable to harness ChatGPT to assist with the identification of predatory journals. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: ChatGPT may effectively distinguish between predatory and legitimate journals, with accuracy rates of 92.5 % and 71 %, respectively. The potential utility of large-scale language models in exposing predatory publications is worthy of further consideration.
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Publicações Periódicas como Assunto , Estudos TransversaisRESUMO
A frequent complaint of editors of scientific journals is that it has become increasingly difficult to find reviewers for evaluating submitted manuscripts. Such claims are, most commonly, based on anecdotal evidence. To gain more insight grounded on empirical evidence, editorial data of manuscripts submitted for publication to the Journal of Comparative Physiology A between 2014 and 2021 were analyzed. No evidence was found that more invitations were necessary over time to get manuscripts reviewed; that the reviewer's response time after invitation increased; that the number of reviewers who completed their reports, relative to the number of reviewers who had agreed to review a manuscript, decreased; and that the recommendation behavior of reviewers changed. The only significant trend observed was among reviewers who completed their reports later than agreed. The average number of days that these reviewers submitted their evaluations roughly doubled over the period analyzed. By contrast, neither the proportion of late vs. early reviews, nor the time for completing the reviews among the punctual reviewers, changed. Comparison with editorial data from other journals suggests that journals that serve a smaller community of readers and authors, and whose editors themselves contact potential reviewers, perform better in terms of reviewer recruitment and performance than journals that receive large numbers of submissions and use editorial assistants for sending invitations to potential reviewers.
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Revisão por Pares , Editoração , AnimaisRESUMO
The journal impact factor (JIF) is a skewed metrics whose value is dictated by just a few highly cited articles. Therefore, the use of the JIF to evaluate journals, scholars, or research institutes is flawed. Still, the JIF continues to play a central role in evaluating scholarship in chemistry, the most reluctant amid scientific disciplines to embrace the principles of open science. This study investigates the origins of this social behavior, and suggests avenues to improve scholarly communication in the chemical sciences following the example of the life sciences.
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Twenty-first-century discourse on science has been marked by narratives of crisis. Science is said to be experiencing crises of public trust, of peer review and publishing, of reproducibility and replicability, and of recognition and reward. The dominant response has been to "repair" the scientific literature and the system of scientific publishing through open science. This paper places the current predicament of scholarly communication in historical perspective by exploring the evolution of the scientific journal in the second half of the twentieth century. I focus on a new genre of scientific journal invented by Dutch commercial publishers shortly after World War II, and on its effects on the nature of the scientific life. I show that profit-oriented publishers and discipline-building scientists worked together to make postwar science more open, while also arguing that formats of scientific publication have their own agency.
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Revisão por Pares , Editoração , Humanos , Reprodutibilidade dos Testes , Publicações , Comunicação AcadêmicaRESUMO
BACKGROUND: The practice of clinical research is strictly regulated by law. During submission and review processes, compliance of such research with the laws enforced in the country where it was conducted is not always correctly filled in by the authors or verified by the editors. Here, we report a case of a single institution for which one may find hundreds of publications with seemingly relevant ethical concerns, along with 10 months of follow-up through contacts with the editors of these articles. We thus argue for a stricter control of ethical authorization by scientific editors and we call on publishers to cooperate to this end. METHODS: We present an investigation of the ethics and legal aspects of 456 studies published by the IHU-MI (Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection) in Marseille, France. RESULTS: We identified a wide range of issues with the stated research authorization and ethics of the published studies with respect to the Institutional Review Board and the approval presented. Among the studies investigated, 248 were conducted with the same ethics approval number, even though the subjects, samples, and countries of investigation were different. Thirty-nine (39) did not even contain a reference to the ethics approval number while they present research on human beings. We thus contacted the journals that published these articles and provide their responses to our concerns. It should be noted that, since our investigation and reporting to journals, PLOS has issued expressions of concerns for several publications we analyze here. CONCLUSION: This case presents an investigation of the veracity of ethical approval, and more than 10 months of follow-up by independent researchers. We call for stricter control and cooperation in handling of these cases, including editorial requirement to upload ethical approval documents, guidelines from COPE to address such ethical concerns, and transparent editorial policies and timelines to answer such concerns. All supplementary materials are available.
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The ethics of generative artificial intelligence (AI) use in scientific manuscript content creation has become a serious matter of concern in the scientific publishing community. Generative AI has computationally become capable of elaborating research questions; refining programming code; generating text in scientific language; and generating images, graphics, or figures. However, this technology should be used with caution. In this editorial, we outline the current state of editorial policies on generative AI or chatbot use in authorship, peer review, and editorial processing of scientific and scholarly manuscripts. Additionally, we provide JMIR Publications' editorial policies on these issues. We further detail JMIR Publications' approach to the applications of AI in the editorial process for manuscripts in review in a JMIR Publications journal.
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Inteligência Artificial , Software , Humanos , Autoria , Políticas Editoriais , IdiomaRESUMO
Academic conference participation and publications serve as a litmus test to evaluate researchers irrespective of their scientific discipline. Predatory or fake conferences and journals exploit this issue and rebrand themselves through multiple methods. This paper serves to introduce rebranding as one of the features adopted by predatory journals and conferences and formulate some important measures that could be taken by academic libraries, researchers, and publishers to address this issue. We found that rebranding serves as an efficient measure to evade legal implications. However, empirical longitudinal studies addressing the issue are absent. We have explained rebranding, multiple ways of rebranding, issues surrounding predatory publishing, and the role of academic libraries and provided a five-point prevention strategy to protect researchers from academic malpractices. Dedicated tools, scientific prowess, and vigilance of academic libraries and researchers can safeguard the scientific community. Creating awareness, increasing transparency of available databases, and the support of academic libraries and publishing houses along with global support will serve as effective measures to tackle predatory malpractices.
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OBJECTIVES: To create a comprehensive list of all openly available online trainings in scholarly peer review and to analyze their characteristics. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: A systematic review of online training material in scholarly peer review openly accessible between 2012 and 2022. Training characteristics were presented in evidence tables and summarized narratively. A risk of bias tool was purpose-built for this study to evaluate the included training material as evidence-based. RESULTS: Fourty-two training opportunities in manuscript peer review were identified, of which only twenty were openly accessible. Most were online modules (n = 12, 60%) with an estimated completion time of less than 1 hour (n = 13, 65%). Using our ad hoc risk of bias tool, four sources (20%) met our criteria of evidence-based. CONCLUSION: Our comprehensive search of the literature identified 20 openly accessible online training materials in manuscript peer review. For such a crucial step in the dissemination of literature, a lack of training could potentially explain disparities in the quality of scholarly publishing.
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Editoração , Comunicação Acadêmica , Humanos , Revisão por Pares , Viés , Revisão da Pesquisa por ParesRESUMO
Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions within microbiology globally. Studies show that gender bias affects the progression of women in academia, but there is evidence that improving conscious awareness of bias can improve equity in this regard. Here we analyse the publication data associated with review articles within the microbiology field to investigate the statistical associations with author gender. We analyse the data from review articles published between 2010 and 2022 in three leading microbiology review journals: Nature Reviews Microbiology, Trends in Microbiology and Annual Review of Microbiology. We find a significant association between the gender of the lead author and the gender of co-authors in multi-author publications. Review articles with men lead authors have a significantly reduced proportion of women co-authors compared to reviews with women lead authors. Given the existing differences in the proportions of men and women in lead author positions, this association may have important consequences for the relative visibility of women in microbiology, along with negative impacts on scientific output relating to reduced collaboration diversity.
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Autoria , Editoração , Humanos , Masculino , Feminino , Sexismo , Estado de ConsciênciaRESUMO
Varela-Briceño, M. (2023). La publicación de los conjuntos de datos por medio de las revistas científicas: el caso de Pensar en Movimiento. PENSAR EN MOVIMIENTO: Revista de Ciencias del Ejercicio y la Salud, 21(1), 1-6. La publicación científica ha evolucionado y con ellos las revistas académicas, desde sus inicios en versiones impresas y actualmente las electrónicas, lo cual ha llevado a una serie de cambios en los procesos de gestión. Es así que se han establecidos los movimientos del acceso y la ciencia abierta. El propósito de este editorial es hacer un recorrido sobre la publicación de conjuntos de datos, su importancia y ventajas; además de mostrar la iniciativa de Pensar en Movimiento de poner a disposición las bases de datos que acompañan los artículos de investigación.
Varela-Briceño, M. (2023). The publication of data sets through scientific journals: The case of Pensar en Movimiento. PENSAR EN MOVIMIENTO: Revista de Ciencias del Ejercicio y la Salud, 21(1), 1-6. Scientific publishing has evolved, and academic journals have evolved with it—initially in printed versions, and currently in electronic ones. This has resulted in a series of changes in management processes. For instance, the movements for open access and science have emerged. The purpose of this editorial is to present an overview of the publication of data sets, its importance and advantages, in addition to showing the initiative of Pensar en Movimiento to make available the data bases that go along with research articles.
Varela-Briceño, M. (2023). A publicação de conjuntos de dados através de revistas científicas: o caso de Pensar en Movimiento. PENSAR EN MOVIMIENTO: Revista de Ciencias del Ejercicio y de la Salud, 21(1), 1-6. A publicação científica evoluiu, e com ela as revistas acadêmicas; desde sua criação, em versões impressas, e atualmente eletrônicas, o que levou a uma série de mudanças nos processos de gestão. É assim que os movimentos de acesso e ciência aberta foram estabelecidos. O objetivo deste editorial é fazer uma jornada pela publicação de conjuntos de dados, sua importância e vantagens; além de mostrar a iniciativa da revista Pensar en Movimiento de disponibilizar as bases de dados que acompanham os artigos de pesquisa.
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Publicação Periódica , Políticas Editoriais , Publicações Científicas e Técnicas , Costa Rica , Acesso à Informação , Conjunto de DadosRESUMO
Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use.
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Comunicação Persuasiva , Editoração , Leitura , RedaçãoRESUMO
Despite improvement in gender inequality in Australian science, the problem has not been fully addressed yet. To better understand the nature of gender inequality in Australian science, all gendered Australian first authored articles published between 2010 and 2020 and indexed in the Dimensions database were analysed. Field of Research (FoR) was used as the subject classification of articles and Field Citation Ratio (FCR) was used for citation comparison. Overall, the ratio of female to male first authored articles increased over the years, and this was true for all FoRs except for information and computing sciences. The ratio of single-authored articles by females was also improved over the study period. Females appeared to have a citation advantage, using Field Citation Ratio, over males in a few FoRs including mathematical sciences, chemical sciences, technology, built environment and design, studies in human society, law and legal studies, and studies in creative arts and writing. The average FCR for female first authored articles was greater than the average FCR for male first authored articles, including in a few fields such mathematical sciences where male authors outperformed females in terms of the number of articles.