scholarly journals The state of population health research performance in the Middle East and North Africa: a meta-research study

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karima Chaabna ◽  
Sohaila Cheema ◽  
Amit Abraham ◽  
Patrick Maisonneuve ◽  
Albert B. Lowenfels ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Research Performance ◽  
Western Country ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Registration Number ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Background Population health (PH) research capacity and performance are essential pillars of evidence-based practice to help address health inequalities. Best evidence is provided by systematic reviews (SRs). None of the published bibliometric analysis specifically assess the production of SRs on PH in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The aim of our study is to investigate publication patterns and time trends of SRs reporting PH in the MENA region to evaluate the state of PH research performance in the region. Method The study protocol was developed a priori (protocol registration number: CRD42017076736). PubMed was searched. Two independent reviewers screened 5747 identified articles. We investigated author affiliation and collaboration, yearly citations of the SRs and journal information. Joinpoint regression was used to explore these characteristics overtime. Results Our meta-research included 387 SRs published between 2008 and 2016 which reported data on PH in 20 MENA countries. Publication of SRs increased over time in journals with impact factor < 4 and in the categories of yearly number of citations < 50 (p values ≤ 0.0024). Authors belonging to the region published increasingly (p value = 0.0001) over time. Thirty percent of the SRs were from authors solely from the region, while an additional 30% were from the region collaborating with Western country authors. Of these collaborative reviews, 79% were led by authors from the region. However, collaboration in the region (with the exclusion of collaboration with Western country authors) was rare (0.8%). These authors from the region published more in open-access journals while authors from Western countries collaborating or not with authors from the region published more in hybrid or non-open-access journals (p value < 0.0001). Collaboration between authors from MENA and Western countries led to published SRs in journals with impact factor ≥ 10. Systematic reviews with global coverage were published more by authors from Western countries, while SRs with country-level coverage were published by authors from the region (p value < 0.0001). Conclusion The incremental trend of PH SR publications on MENA likely reflects the ongoing improvement in research performance in the region. Authors from the region appear to be taking a lead role in conducting and disseminating MENA PH research. Open-access journals are a major contributor in facilitating MENA research dissemination. Systematic review registration PROSPERO registration number CRD42017076736

scholarly journals Open Access: An analysis of European publisher copyright and licensing policies today

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignasi Labastida i Juan
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Scholarly Journal ◽  
First Principle ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
European Publisher ◽  
Academic Authors ◽  
Share Information ◽  
Over Time

The digital age has brought authors of publications many more opportunities to gain further impact and visibility by sharing their work online through websites, pre-print servers, repositories, publishing platforms or other digital venues as well as journals. Publisher copyright policies have not always been enablers of these new practices but change is underway. Europe has also seen a surge in international, national and local Open Access (OA) policies in recent years, a significant one being Plan S with its requirements related to rights retention and open licensing. How far are publishers in supporting authors in this change? In early 2020 SPARC Europe commissioned a report to gain a better understanding of current copyright and licensing practices amongst scholarly journal publishers based in Europe and how these are presented to academic authors. The key purpose of the study was to provide evidence on how publisher policies support OA and to see whether the complexity of the copyright and self-archiving landscape amongst publishers has simplified over time. We also explored how Plan S-ready publishers were with regards to the first principle of their policy related to authors or their institutions being required to retain copyright to their publications, calling for all publications to be published under an open license, preferably CC BY, immediately and under no embargo. Research was undertaken on various levels: the 2020 study reviewed the copyright, self-archiving and open licensing policies from 10 large legacy publisher websites and then asked these publishers to verify these findings. We also analysed the policies of pure open access journals in Europe from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). To limit the scope, Europe was taken as the focus of this research. This paper will firstly demonstrate how diversely publishers present and share information on their copyright, licensing and self-archiving policies and how challenging this can be for authors and the institutions that support them. We will also share findings on the specifics of publisher policies be they hybrid or pure OA. For example, examining how far large publishers currently allow authors to retain publishing rights for articles, to what extent they allow zero embargoes when self-archiving or how far pure OA journals use the CC BY license. This paper ends by making a number of recommendations to publishers, research funders, institutions and authors to ultimately support authors to more easily navigate this policy landscape and to be able to publish immediate OA.

scholarly journals “Worth(less) papers” – are journal impact factor and number of citations suitable indicators to evaluate quality of scientists?

2018 ◽  
Vol XVI (2) ◽  
pp. 369-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Racz ◽  
Suzana Marković
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Journal Impact Factor ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Digital Repository ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
On Line ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Journal Impact

Technology driven changings with consecutive increase in the on-line availability and accessibility of journals and papers rapidly changes patterns of academic communication and publishing. The dissemination of important research findings through the academic and scientific community begins with publication in peer-reviewed journals. Aim of this article is to identify, critically evaluate and integrate the findings of relevant, high-quality individual studies addressing the trends of enhancement of visibility and accessibility of academic publishing in digital era. The number of citations a paper receives is often used as a measure of its impact and by extension, of its quality. Many aberrations of the citation practices have been reported in the attempt to increase impact of someone’s paper through manipulation with self-citation, inter-citation and citation cartels. Authors revenues to legally extend visibility, awareness and accessibility of their research outputs with uprising in citation and amplifying measurable personal scientist impact has strongly been enhanced by on line communication tools like networking (LinkedIn, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar), sharing (Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, Google Plus) media sharing (Slide Share), data sharing (Dryad Digital Repository, Mendeley database, PubMed, PubChem), code sharing, impact tracking. Publishing in Open Access journals. Many studies and review articles in last decade have examined whether open access articles receive more citations than equivalent subscription toll access) articles and most of them lead to conclusion that there might be high probability that open access articles have the open access citation advantage over generally equivalent payfor-access articles in many, if not most disciplines. But it is still questionable are those never cited papers indeed “Worth(less) papers” and should journal impact factor and number of citations be considered as only suitable indicators to evaluate quality of scientists? “Publish or perish” phrase usually used to describe the pressure in academia to rapidly and continually publish academic work to sustain or further one’s career can now in 21. Century be reformulate into “Publish, be cited and maybe will not Perish”.

scholarly journals Open Access Journals – The way forward for out-of-hospital research publications

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Healthcare Provider ◽  
Open Access Journal ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Editorial Boards ◽  
Research Publications ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
General Community ◽  
Hospital Research

The open access journal is becoming a common place to publish compared to the traditional paper based journal as the work is readily available to the research and general community.  The academic community place a lot of emphasis on the quality and impact factor of journals.  There are numerous problems with this stance especially for academic paramedics and the general out-of-hospital healthcare provider.  Some in the academic community look upon open access journals as not being “proper” or “lacking in quality”. In the majority of instances this is not the case as the open access journals have comparable international editorial boards who oversee the manuscript handling processes.

scholarly journals Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 354
Author(s):  
Muruli Acharya
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Analytical Study ◽  
Plant Science ◽  
Research Information ◽  
Commercial Practice ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Significant Magnitude ◽  
The Status

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>With the advent of open access movement, open access journals (OAJs) being the prodigious source of academic </span><span>and research information have been gaining significant magnitude. The electronic age has made it easier and more </span><span>convenient than ever to break barriers to research information. The present study aims to study and analyse the status </span><span>of 497 OAJs in Agriculture indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals. Specified traits such as Geographic and </span><span>language wise distribution, coverage of Indexing/Abstracting databases, ranking of journals according to Impact Factor (IF), OA licensing model adopted, policy of plagiarism, visibility on social media and related issues of the </span><span>OAJs in Agriculture are evaluated in the paper. Results indicated the dominance of De Gruyter Open as a publisher with highest number of OAJs, English as a content language, Indonesia with highest number of OAJs, Google scholar </span><span>with highest journals indexed. The study observes the increasing migration of journals from commercial practice to OA. </span><span>Frontiers in Plant Science </span><span>found with highest Impact Factor among OAJs in Agriculture. </span></p></div></div></div>

scholarly journals Substance use disorders in refugee and migrant groups in Sweden: a nationwide cohort study of 1.2 million people

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bowes Kirkbride ◽  
Jen Dykxhoorn
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Cohort Study ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Substance Use Disorders ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Region Of Origin ◽  
Polydrug Use ◽  
Ptsd Diagnosis ◽  
Age At Migration ◽  
Over Time

AbstractBackground: Refugees are at higher risk of some psychiatric disorders, including PTSD and psychosis, compared with other non-refugee migrants and the majority population. However, it is unclear whether this also applies to substance use disorders, which we investigated in a national register cohort study in Sweden. We also investigated whether risk varied by region-of-origin, age-at-migration, time in Sweden and diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methods and findings: Using linked Swedish register data, we followed a cohort born between 1984 and 1997, from their 14th birthday or arrival in Sweden if later, until an International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision (ICD-10) diagnosis of substance use disorder (codes F10.X-19.X), emigration, death, or end of follow-up (31 December 2016). Refugee and non-refugee migrants were restricted to those from regions with at least 1000 refugees in the Swedish registers. We used Cox proportional hazards regression to estimate unadjusted and adjusted hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) in refugee and non-refugee migrants, compared with Swedish-born individuals, for all substance use disorders (F10.X-19.X), alcohol use disorders (F10.X), cannabis use disorders (F12.X), and polydrug use disorders (F19.X). In adjusted analyses, we controlled for age, sex, birth year, family income, family employment status, population density and PTSD diagnosis. Our sample of 1,241,901 participants included 17,783 (1.4%) refugee and 104,250 (8.4%) non-refugee migrants. Refugees' regions of origin were represented in proportions ranging from 6.0% (Eastern Europe &amp; Russia) to 41.4% (Middle East and North Africa); Proportions of non-refugee migrants' regions of origin ranged from 11.8% (sub-Saharan Africa) to 33.7% (Middle East and North Africa). These groups were more economically disadvantaged at cohort entry (p&lt;0.001) than the Swedish-born population. Refugee (adjusted HR: 0.52; 95%CI: 0.46-0.60) and non-refugee (aHR: 0.46; 95%CI: 0.43-0.49) migrants had similarly lower rates of all substance use disorders compared with Swedish-born individuals (crude incidence: 290.2 cases per 100,000 person-years; 95%CI: 287.3-293.1). Rates of substance use disorders in migrants converged to the Swedish-born rate over time, indicated by both earlier age-at-migration and longer time in Sweden. We observed similar patterns for alcohol, cannabis and polydrug use disorders, and the findings did not differ substantially by migrants’ region-of-origin. Finally, while a PTSD diagnosis was over 5 times more common in refugees than the Swedish-born population, it was more strongly associated with increased rates of substance use disorders in the Swedish-born population (aHR: 7.36, 95%CI: 6.79-7.96) than non-refugee migrants (HR: 4.88; 95%CI: 3.71-6.41; likelihood ratio test: p=0.01). The main limitations of our study were possible non-differential or differential under-ascertainment (by migrant status) of those only seen via primary care and that our findings may not generalise to undocumented migrants, who were not part of this study. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that lower rates of substance use disorders in migrants and refugees may reflect prevalent behaviors with respect to substance use in migrants’ countries of origin, although this effect appeared to diminish over time in Sweden, with rates converging towards the substantial burden of substance use morbidity we observed in the Swedish-born population.

scholarly journals EFFICIENCY, INEFFICIENCY, AND THE MENA FRONTIER

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-521
Author(s):  
Dimitris K. Christopoulos ◽  
Peter McAdam
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Technical Efficiency ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Economic Efficiency ◽  
Principal Components ◽  
Large Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Over Time

We examine technical efficiency in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In addition to economic indicators, political and social ones play a role in development and efficiency profiles. The MENA have been characterized by increasing economic efficiency over time but with marked polarization. We analyze and nest many key hypotheses, e.g., the contributions of religion, of natural resources, demographic pressures, human capital, etc. The originality of our contribution is the use of a large data set (including principal components), and extensive robustness checks. It should set a comprehensive benchmark and cross-check for related studies of development and technical efficiency.

What are the variables associated with Altmetric scores? – An overview of methodological reviews (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Costa Araujo Sr ◽  
Adriane Aver Vanin Sr ◽  
Dafne Port Nascimento Sr ◽  
Gabrielle Zoldan Gonzalez Sr ◽  
Leonardo Oliveira Pena Costa Sr
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Journal Impact Factor ◽  
Cochrane Library ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Citation Counts ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Journal Impact ◽  
Publishing Journal

BACKGROUND The most common way to assess the impact of an article is based upon the number of citations. However, the number of citations do not precisely reflect if the message of the paper is reaching a wider audience. Currently, social media has been used to disseminate contents of scientific articles. In order to measure this type of impact a new tool named Altmetric was created. Altmetric aims to quantify the impact of each article through the media online. OBJECTIVE This overview of methodological reviews aims to describe the associations between the publishing journal and the publishing articles variables with Altmetric scores. METHODS Search strategies on MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, CENTRAL and Cochrane Library including publications since the inception until July 2018 were conducted. We extracted data related to the publishing trial and the publishing journal associated with Altmetric scores. RESULTS A total of 11 studies were considered eligible. These studies summarized a total of 565,352 articles. The variables citation counts, journal impact factor, access counts (i.e. considered as the sum of HTML views and PDF downloads), papers published as open access and press release generated by the publishing journal were associated with Altmetric scores. The magnitudes of these correlations ranged from weak to moderate. CONCLUSIONS Citation counts and journal impact factor are the most common associators of high Altmetric scores. Other variables such as access counts, papers published in open access journals and the use of press releases are also likely to influence online media attention. CLINICALTRIAL N/A

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