Deciphering dimensions of overlapping publications

Proving research efficiency and academic growth by the number of publications flag the researchers to publish more articles from a single dataset. They are crossing into unethical practices such as self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, and other research misconducts, which warrant disciplinary action against them. The thrust of this review is to draw the attention of the authors, reviewers, editors, and readers toward different dimensions of overlapping publications in research. Various guidelines and ethical bodies such as Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors were considered for the review. The present review provides an expansive outline of publication overlap available in the literature. The reasons for conducting and problems associated with different types of overlapping publications are identified. Preventive and remedial measures as well as recommendations for authors, editors, and reviewers have been highlighted. Because of the strain to “publish or perish” from the researchers’ end, journals are ending up being flooded with overlapping publications.

Efficiency of Higher Education in the Presence of Shared Inputs using Data Envelopment Analysis

This study measures the efficiency of higher education institutions with respect to teaching activity, research activity, and overall activities and also provides a direction for low-performing institutions to improve their performance. In many instances, the efficiency of the institution is a sum up of the efficiency of its activities. However, when the activities consume some resources in common, it requires the allocation of shared resources among the activities. Since sums up the efficiency of each activity does not give the institution's overall efficiency, we use a joint data envelopment analysis that takes into account the institution's internal operations to measure the teaching efficiency, research efficiency, and overall efficiency of the institutions. The empirical results indicate that the institutions that execute both activities simultaneously become more productive rather than adopt a single activity. Hence, this study suggests a useful and measurable action to improve the institution’s performance.

Waving away waivers: an obligation to contribute to ‘herd knowledge’ for data linkage research?

In today’s online data-driven world, people constantly shed data and deposit digital footprints. When individuals access health services, governments and health providers collect and store large volumes of health information about people that can later be retrieved, linked and analysed for research purposes. This can lead to new discoveries in medicine and healthcare. In addition, when securely stored and de-identified, the privacy risks are minimal and manageable. In many jurisdictions, ethics committees routinely waive the requirement for researchers to obtain consent from data subjects before using and linking these datasets in an effort to balance respect for individuals with research efficiency. In this paper, I explore the ethical justification for using routinely collected health data for research without consent. I conclude that, not only is this morally justified but also that data subjects have a moral obligation to contribute their data to such research, which would obviate the need for ethics committees to consider consent waivers. In justifying this argument, I look to the duty of easy rescue, distributive justice and draw analogies with vaccination ethics.

Indicators To Evaluate Research Efficiency in Higher Education Institutions

The comparison of efficiency between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) based on quantitative and absolute data, is it may not be the most honest way to establish efficiency levels. This study aims to propose indicators for evaluating efficiency in research to compose the management report of intangible assets in HEI. A search was performed in the SCOPUS bibliographic base to identify the intellectual production of the Federal University of Sergipe in the period from 1977 to 2019. The results demonstrate a positive trend in the growth of the volume of publications and that the intellectual production of the university is the result of its integration in national and international networks of scientific collaboration. A management report that aims to demonstrate the value of the university should accurately contemplate the intangible assets produced by it, which could be used as indicators of research efficiency. The disclosure of the value of intangible assets is a strategy to increase the value and credibility of the brand, but also a form of positive accountability to its maintainer and to society.

Advances in Multi-Omics Applications in HBV-Associated Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) specifically infects liver cells, leading to progressive liver cirrhosis and significantly increasing the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The maturity of sequencing technology, improvement in bioinformatics data analysis and progress of omics technologies had improved research efficiency. The occurrence and progression of HCC are affected by multisystem and multilevel pathological changes. With the application of single-omics technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and proteomics in tissue and body fluid samples, and even the novel development of multi-omics analysis on a single-cell platform, HBV-associated HCC changes can be better analyzed. The review summarizes the application of single omics and combined analysis of multi-omics data in HBV-associated HCC and proposes the importance of multi-omics analysis in the type of HCC, which provide the possibility for the precise diagnosis and therapy of HBV-associated HCC.

An Analysis of COVID-19 in Europe Based on Fractal Dimension and Meteorological Data

The present paper proposes a fractal analysis of the Covid-19 dynamics in 45 European countries. We introduce a new idea of using the box-counting dimension of the epidemiologic curves as a means of classifying the Covid-19 pandemic in the countries taken into consideration. The classification can be a useful tool in deciding upon the quality and accuracy of the data available. We also investigated the reproduction rate, which proves to have significant fractal features, thus enabling another perspective on this epidemic characteristic. Moreover, we studied the correlation between two meteorological parameters: global radiation and daily mean temperature and two Covid-19 indicators: daily new cases and reproduction rate. The fractal dimension differences between the analysed time series graphs could represent a preliminary analysis criterion, increasing research efficiency. Daily global radiation was found to be stronger linked with Covid-19 new cases than air temperature (with a greater correlation coefficient -0.386, as compared with -0.318), and consequently it is recommended as the first-choice meteorological variable for prediction models.

Research on the Scientific Research Efficiency of Provincial Universities Based on the DEA Model

As the main factor of China’s higher education, effective evaluation of the scientific research efficiency of domestic universities is extremely significant to improve the scientific research management system of local universities, optimize the allocation of scientific research resources, and promote regional economic development. Based on the ten-year statistical data of the compilation of science and technology statistics of colleges and universities, this paper adopts the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to study the scientific research efficiency of 31 provincial universities in Shandong Province from three dimensions: level, type, and region. The results show that, first, the overall scientific research efficiency of the sample universities is not high and takes on a downward trend; there are some differences, changes in the same direction, and level convergence in each dimension of scientific research efficiency. Second, there is a positive correlation between the comprehensive scientific research strength of the sample universities and the technical efficiency. Third, the level of regional economic development has a positive impact on the scale efficiency of scientific research, which is closely related to the technical efficiency, and there is no positive correlation between these two. Thus, the research suggests that, in the future, colleges and universities should formulate differentiated management policies, build a “Government University” two-level scientific research performance evaluation system guided by scientific research quality, change the concept of scientific research managers, and improve the ability of personnel to improve the efficiency of scientific research in colleges and universities.

Tenzing and the importance of tool development for research efficiency

The way science is done is changing. While some tools are facilitating this change, others lag behind. The resulting mismatch between tools and researchers’ workflows can be inefficient and delay the progress of research. As an example, information about the people associated with a published journal article was traditionally handled manually and unsystematically. However, as large-scale collaboration, sometimes referred to as “team science,” is now common, a more structured and easy-to-automate approach to managing meta-data is required. In this paper we describe how the latest version of tenzing (A.O. Holcombe et al., Documenting contributions to scholarly articles using CRediT and tenzing, PLOS One 15(12) (2020), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383578, accessed July 13, 2021) helps researchers collect and structure contributor information efficiently and without frustration. Using tenzing as an example, we discuss the importance of efficient tools to reforming science and our experience with tool development as researchers.