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Register a new userDisturbance of greedy publishing to academia
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Questionable publications have been accused of greedy practices; however, their influence on academia has not been gauged. Here, we probe the impact of questionable publications through a systematic and comprehensive analysis with various participants from academia and compare the results with those of their unaccused counterparts using billions of citation records, including liaisons, e.g., journals and publishers, and prosumers, e.g., authors. The analysis reveals that questionable publications embellished their citation scores by attributing publisher-level self-citations to their journals while also controlling the journal-level self-citations to circumvent the evaluation of journal-indexing services. This approach makes it difficult to detect malpractice by conventional journal-level metrics. We propose journal-publisher-hybrid metric that help detect malpractice. We also demonstrate that the questionable publications had a weaker disruptiveness and influence than their counterparts. This indicates the negative effect of suspicious publishers in the academia. The findings provide a basis for actionable policy making against questionable publications.
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Research on the development of science has focused on the creation of multidisciplinary teams. However, while this coming together of people is symmetrical, the ideas, methods, and vocabulary of science have a directional flow. We present a statistical model of the text of dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010, revealing for the first time the large-scale flow of language across fields. Results of the analysis include identifying methodological fields that export broadly, emerging topical fields that borrow heavily and expand, and old topical fields that grow insular and retract. Particular findings show a growing split between molecular and ecological forms of biology and a sea change in the humanities and social sciences driven by the rise of gender and ethnic studies.
Scientific publishing is the means by which we communicate and share scientific knowledge, but this process currently often lacks transparency and machine-interpretable representations. Scientific articles are published in long coarse-grained text with complicated structures, and they are optimized for human readers and not for automated means of organization and access. Peer reviewing is the main method of quality assessment, but these peer reviews are nowadays rarely published and their own complicated structure and linking to the respective articles is not accessible. In order to address these problems and to better align scientific publishing with the principles of the Web and Linked Data, we propose here an approach to use nanopublications as a unifying model to represent in a semantic way the elements of publications, their assessments, as well as the involved processes, actors, and provenance in general. To evaluate our approach, we present a dataset of 627 nanopublications representing an interlinked network of the elements of articles (such as individual paragraphs) and their reviews (such as individual review comments). Focusing on the specific scenario of editors performing a meta-review, we introduce seven competency questions and show how they can be executed as SPARQL queries. We then present a prototype of a user interface for that scenario that shows different views on the set of review comments provided for a given manuscript, and we show in a user study that editors find the interface useful to answer their competency questions. In summary, we demonstrate that a unified and semantic publication model based on nanopublications can make scientific communication more effective and user-friendly.
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Tatiana Savina
, Ivan Sterligov (National Research University Highern School of Economics
, Moscow
2020
We present the results of a large-scale study of potentially predatory journals (PPJ) represented in the Scopus database, which is widely used for research evaluation. Both journal metrics and country, disciplinary data have been evaluated for different groups of PPJ: those listed by Jeffrey Beall and those delisted by Scopus because of publication concerns. Our results show that even after years of delisting, PPJ are still highly visible in the Scopus database with hundreds of active potentially predatory journals. PPJ papers are continuously produced by all major countries, but with different shares. All major subject areas are affected. The largest number of PPJ papers are in engineering and medicine. On average, PPJ have much lower citation metrics than other Scopus-indexed journals. We conclude with a brief survey of the case of Kazakhstan where the share of PPJ papers at one time amounted to almost a half of all Kazakhstan papers in Scopus, and propose a link between PPJ share and national research evaluation policies (in particular, rules of awarding academic degrees). The progress of potentially predatory journal research will be increasingly important because such evaluation methods are becoming more widespread in times of the Metric Tide.
Open Science, Reproducible Research, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data principles are long term goals for scientific dissemination. However, the implementation of these principles calls for a reinspection of our means of dissemination. In our viewpoint, we discuss and advocate, in the context of nonlinear science, how a notebook article represents an essential step toward this objective by fully embracing cloud computing solutions. Notebook articles as scholar articles offer an alternative, efficient and more ethical way to disseminate research through their versatile environment. This format invites the readers to delve deeper into the reported research. Through the interactivity of the notebook articles, research results such as for instance equations and figures are reproducible even for non-expert readers. The codes and methods are available, in a transparent manner, to interested readers. The methods can be reused and adapted to answer additional questions in related topics. The codes run on cloud computing services, which provide easy access, even to low-income countries and research groups. The versatility of this environment provides the stakeholders - from the researchers to the publishers - with opportunities to disseminate the research results in innovative ways.
We analyze the reaction of academic communities to a particular urgent topic which abruptly arises as a scientific problem. To this end, we have chosen the disaster that occurred in 1986 in Chornobyl (Chernobyl), Ukraine, considered as one of the most devastating nuclear power plant accidents in history. The academic response is evaluated using scientific-publication data concerning the disaster using the Scopus database to present the picture on an international scale and the bibliographic database Ukrainika naukova to consider it on a national level. We measured distributions of papers in different scientific fields, their growth rates and properties of co-authorship networks. {The elements of descriptive statistics and the tools of the complex network theory are used to highlight the interdisciplinary as well as international effects.} Our analysis allows to compare contributions of the international community to Chornobyl-related research as well as integration of Ukraine in the international research on this subject. Furthermore, the content analysis of titles and abstracts of the publications allowed to detect the most important terms used for description of Chornobyl-related problems.
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