scholarly journals Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing

2022 ◽  
pp. 174701612110687
Author(s):  
Mina Mehregan

Citation is an essential practice in scientific publishing. However, it is mandatory that citing the sources in a scientific work is performed in a proper manner. Manipulating citations in research articles is one form of academic research misconduct that violates publication ethics. Citation manipulation simply occurs for the purpose of increasing the number of citations of a researcher or a journal. Unfortunately, there has been a growing trend for this type of misconduct recently and this has not received much attention from the science community. The most effective solution to prevent the growth of such unethical practices is for reputable journals to impose stricter rules on reference evaluation criteria in order to emphasize on the appropriateness of the citations.

Mediscope ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
MS Laskar

An area of concern in scientific research including medical research is misconduct or dishonesty like fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. This article focuses on the concepts of research misconduct with the objectives to discuss briefly on the extent of problem, various forms, possible reasons; methods of detection, and prevention. It is expected that this article will encourage the leaders of academic research groups to inform their students, future researchers and research associates about the ethical responsibilities of scientific research and publications, and to insure that, when they are given the responsibility for research and consequently submitting a paper, they are fully aware of the potential consequences to themselves and to their coauthors for violations of research ethical guidelines.Mediscope Vol. 4, No. 2: Jul 2017, Page 1-4


2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1847-1862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Porta ◽  
José L. Copete ◽  
Esteve Fernandez ◽  
Joan Alguacil ◽  
Janeth Murillo

News of the death of biomedical journals seem premature. Revamped traditional scientific journals remain highly valued sources and vehicles of information, critical debate, and knowledge. Some analyses seem to place a disproportionate emphasis on technological and formal issues, as compared to the importance ascribed to matters of power. Not all journals must necessarily have a large circulation. There are many examples of efficient, high-quality journals with a great impact on relatively small audiences for whom the journal is thought-provoking, useful, and pleasant to read. How can we achieve a better understanding of an article’s spectrum of impacts? A certain mixing of three distinct entities (journals, articles, and authors) has often pervaded judgments. Data used by the Institute for Scientific Information present weaknesses in their accuracy. The two-year limit for citations to count towards the bibliographic impact factor favors "fast-moving", "basic" biomedical disciplines and is less appropriate for public health studies. Increasing attention is given to the specific number of citations received by each individual article. It is possible to make progress towards more valid, accurate, fair, and relevant assessments.


F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Giordan ◽  
Attila Csikasz-Nagy ◽  
Andrew M. Collings ◽  
Federico Vaggi

BackgroundPublishing in scientific journals is one of the most important ways in which scientists disseminate research to their peers and to the wider public. Pre-publication peer review underpins this process, but peer review is subject to various criticisms and is under pressure from growth in the number of scientific publications.MethodsHere we examine an element of the editorial process ateLife, in which the Reviewing Editor usually serves as one of the referees, to see what effect this has on decision times, decision type, and the number of citations. We analysed a dataset of 8,905 research submissions toeLifesince June 2012, of which 2,750 were sent for peer review, using R and Python to perform the statistical analysis.ResultsThe Reviewing Editor serving as one of the peer reviewers results in faster decision times on average, with the time to final decision ten days faster for accepted submissions (n=1,405) and 5 days faster for papers that were rejected after peer review (n=1,099). There was no effect on whether submissions were accepted or rejected, and a very small (but significant) effect on citation rates for published articles where the Reviewing Editor served as one of the peer reviewers.ConclusionsAn important aspect ofeLife’s peer-review process is shown to be effective, given that decision times are faster when the Reviewing Editor serves as a reviewer. Other journals hoping to improve decision times could consider adopting a similar approach.


Author(s):  
Jadranka Stojanovski ◽  
Elías Sanz-Casado ◽  
Tommaso Agnoloni ◽  
Ginevra Peruginelli

The field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. External and independent evaluation of submissions has recently become adopted by European law journals, and peer review procedures are still poorly defined, investigated, and attuned to the legal science publishing landscape. The aim of our study was to gain a better insight into current editorial policies on peer review in law journals by exploring editorial documents (instructions, guidelines, policies) issued by 119 Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals. We relied on automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available documents collected from the journal websites to analyze the basic features of the peer review processes, manuscript evaluation criteria, and related ethical issues using WordStat8. Differences in covered topics between the countries were compared using the chi-square test. Our findings reveal that most law journals have adopted a traditional approach, in which the editorial board manages mostly anonymized peer review (104, 77%) engaging independent/external reviewers (65, 48%). Submissions are evaluated according to their originality and relevance (113, 84%), quality of writing and presentation (94, 70%), comprehensiveness of literature references (93, 69%), and adequacy of methods (57, 42%). The main ethical issues related to peer review addressed by these journals are reviewer’s competing interests (42, 31%), plagiarism (35, 26%), and biases (30, 22%). We observed statistically significant differences between countries in mentioning key concepts such as “Peer review ethics”, “Reviewer”, “Transparency of identities”, “Publication type”, and “Research misconduct”. Spanish journals favor reviewers’ “Independence” and “Competence” and “Anonymized” peer review process. Also, some manuscript types popular in one country are rarely mentioned in other countries. Even though peer review is equally conventional in all three countries, high transparency in Croatian law journals, respect for research integrity in Spanish ones, and diversity and inclusion in Italian are promising indicators of future development.


Author(s):  
Zafer Adiguzel

Business ethics is a scientific discipline that analyzes and explains norms and values that guide the business world. When the books and academic researches about business ethics are examined, it is understood that interest in business ethics has started to increase. Among the most important reasons for business interest, ethics is the impact of economic development and globalization. The story of the economy and the adaptation to the global market with each passing day has brought unethical practices to the agenda. It is considered that models that improve the decision-making mechanisms of managers against corrupt practices are deemed necessary. In the study, many studies have been cited as references to explain business ethics' individual and organizational factors. It aims to contribute to the literature with the results and results of the academic research conducted on these models.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 1136-1142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malke Asaad ◽  
Austin Paul Kallarackal ◽  
Jesse Meaike ◽  
Aashish Rajesh ◽  
Rafael U de Azevedo ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Citation skew refers to the unequal distribution of citations to articles published in a particular journal. Objectives We aimed to assess whether citation skew exists within plastic surgery journals and to determine whether the journal impact factor (JIF) is an accurate indicator of the citation rates of individual articles. Methods We used Journal Citation Reports to identify all journals within the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery. The number of citations in 2018 for all individual articles published in 2016 and 2017 was abstracted. Results Thirty-three plastic surgery journals were identified, publishing 9823 articles. The citation distribution showed right skew, with the majority of articles having either 0 or 1 citation (40% and 25%, respectively). A total of 3374 (34%) articles achieved citation rates similar to or higher than their journal’s IF, whereas 66% of articles failed to achieve a citation rate equal to the JIF. Review articles achieved higher citation rates (median, 2) than original articles (median, 1) (P < 0.0001). Overall, 50% of articles contributed to 93.7% of citations and 12.6% of articles contributed to 50% of citations. A weak positive correlation was found between the number of citations and the JIF (r = 0.327, P < 0.0001). Conclusions Citation skew exists within plastic surgery journals as in other fields of biomedical science. Most articles did not achieve citation rates equal to the JIF with a small percentage of articles having a disproportionate influence on citations and the JIF. Therefore, the JIF should not be used to assess the quality and impact of individual scientific work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javad Khazaei Pool ◽  
S. Mohammad Arabzad ◽  
Sobhan Asian ◽  
Milad Fahimi ◽  
Reza Verij Kazemi

Purpose This paper aims to provide a quantitative basis to analytically determine the ranking of the brand personality of Adidas, Asics, Nike, Puma and Saucony brands among Iranian customers via a conventional multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method. Design/methodology/approach Data for determining the importance of evaluation criteria and ranking of brands are gathered by means of distributing questionnaires among a group of Iranian customers of sport shoes, as well as some industrial experts. The fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) was used to rank the brands with regard to dependencies between criteria and alternatives. Findings The results indicate that FANP is a capable method which provides invaluable insights for strategic marketing decisions in the sport product industry. Results show Adidas has the best performance in the sports shoe market compared to the other four brands. In this study, it was found that expertise sophistication was the most important criterion among Aaker’s five main criteria. Originality/value The value of this paper is applying FANP decision-making method for ranking sport shoe brands. This method has not been commonly used in the area of marketing, hence it is added to the pool of techniques used in ranking brands. In addition, evaluation and ranking of brands can be very useful for both academic research and practice. Researchers can benchmark the competences of each brand through evaluating them, and industrialists can extract the competitive advantages of the selected brands.


2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 254-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID B. RESNIK ◽  
SHYAMAL PEDDADA ◽  
WINNON BRUNSON

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1053-1071
Author(s):  
Barbara Herceg Pakšić

By significantly changing the evaluation criteria set out in the Rules on Conditions for Election in Scientific Titles in 2017, law field scientists began to observe the publication of their papers in a way that has not yet been introduced - through scoring, new categorization and indexing in Scopus and WoSCC bases. At the same time, this required the adaptation of scientific journals to the same proclaimed conditions. This is why the characteristics of Croatian legal-scientific reality, in terms of paper publication, have become conditioned by the efforts to undergo standardization and metrics. At the same time this happens without respecting the inherent fundamental characteristic of law as a discipline. One of the basic ones is primarily national orientation. The paper provides a normative analysis of the previous and positive conditions related to the evaluation of the published scientific papers in the field of law, as well as the results of the research obtained by examining law scientists at the four law faculties in the Republic of Croatia. Research findings bring the features of the previous modality of publishing on behalf of legal scientists in Croatia in the light of the new conditions and indicate that the changes presented will affect future publication intention in the field of law.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-119
Author(s):  
Clive Howard-Williams

The Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty is rapidly approaching ratification, and nations which have now signed it see the Protocol as a signal for considerable future debate, if not scrutiny. Everyone has begun to implement, at least in spirit, many of its requirements which are now beginning to have an effect on science on the continent. This is currently evident in at least four different ways: a reallocation of funding from pure science, to �applied� science relating to human impacts,an increase in funding to allow for studies of human impact and the meeting of Protocol obligations,a reassessment by the science community on what can be done with minimal impact, and an imposition on the science community of rules and codes which will restrict many types of scientific work that have been carried out in the past, and will force modifications of future work. Because all science on the continent (as opposed too remote sensing from space) will have an impact there will have to be tradeoffs between the benefit to science and the impact of doing the work. We can only evaluate impacts on those areas of science that we know about at present. The problem is that there will be future, presently unknown areas of science that may be compromised by operations currently considered �safe�. Who knows, for instance, what viruses we are inadvertently spreading and what the importance of these will be in future studies? At present the effects of these organisms are difficult to measure but studies on the role of viruses in natural ecosystems are increasing as technology expands.


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