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

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.

Peer Review in Law Journals

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.

Procedures and Principles of Disposal of Research Misconduct in Japan From the Perspective of Case Analysis

Increased focus on scientific developments and technological innovations and continuously rising research funding have led to numerous cases of research misconduct that blurs the boundaries between ethics, science, and culture. In our paper, we aim to develop a framework for understanding management and governance in the self-discipline stance, based on case studies from Japan. We adopted a quantity approach by examining cases from 2015 to 2019 provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan (MEXT), seeking to analyze the relationship between the handling of research misconduct in Japan and the relevant national regulations from the perspective of behavior definition, investigation process, responsibility, the process of the investigator, and handling measures. The results of this analysis will help to determine improved methods for processing and making decisions, and conducting assessments while examining cases of research misconduct.

A phenomenographic study of scientists’ beliefs about the causes of scientists’ research misconduct

When scientists act unethically, their actions can cause harm to participants, undermine knowledge creation, and discredit the scientific community. Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training is one of the main ways institutions try to prevent scientists from acting unethically. However, this only addresses the problem if scientists value the training, and if the problem stems from ignorance. This study looks at what scientists think causes unethical behavior in science, with the hopes of improving RCR training by shaping it based on the views of the targeted audience ( n = 14 scientists). Previous studies have surveyed scientists about what they believe causes unethical behavior using pre-defined response items. This study uses a qualitative research methodology to elicit scientists’ beliefs without predefining the range of responses. The data for this phenomenographic study were collected from interviews which presented ethical case studies and asked subjects how they would respond to those situations. Categories and subcategories were created to organize their reasonings. This work will inform the development of future methods for preventing unethical behavior in research.