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According to the latest research results, the presence of simple hyphens in the titles of academic papers adversely affects the citation statistics, regardless of the quality of the articles.
This paper analyses usage statistics, citation data and altmetrics from a university press publishing open access monographs. The data suggests, despite the small sample, that authors can to a greater extent influence how their book is discovered by the readership.
Article concludes that the Citation Ratio is a useful and promising tool for comparing scientific impact of publications across disciplines and potentially for interdisciplinary works.
Analysis of survey results and publication data from Scopus suggests that the following factors led authors to choose OA venues: ability to pay publishing charges, disciplinary colleagues’ positive attitudes toward OA, and personal feelings such as altruism and desire to reach a wide audience. Tenure status was not an apparent factor.
There has recently been a significant amount of media concern surrounding the poor mental health of academics. This extended paper sets out the scale of the problem and examines the factors which academics have identified as key causes of stress.
Misleading news claims can be detrimental to public health. We aimed to improve the alignment between causal claims and evidence, without losing news interest (counter to assumptions that news is not interested in communicating caution). We tested two interventions in press releases, which are the main sources for science and health news: (a) aligning the headlines and main causal claims with the underlying evidence (strong for experimental, cautious for correlational) and (b) inserting explicit statements/caveats about inferring causality. The 'participants' were press releases on health-related topics (N = 312; control = 89, claim alignment = 64, causality statement = 79, both = 80) from nine press offices (journals, universities, funders). Outcomes were news content (headlines, causal claims, caveats) in English-language international and national media (newspapers, websites, broadcast; N = 2257), news uptake (% press releases gaining news coverage) and feasibility (% press releases implementing cautious statements). News headlines showed better alignment to evidence when press releases were aligned (intention-to-treat analysis (ITT) 56% vs 52%, OR = 1.2 to 1.9; as-treated analysis (AT) 60% vs 32%, OR = 1.3 to 4.4). News claims also followed press releases, significant only for AT (ITT 62% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.6; AT, 67% vs 39%, OR = 1.4 to 5.7). The same was true for causality statements/caveats (ITT 15% vs 10%, OR = 0.9 to 2.6; AT 20% vs 0%, OR 16 to 156). There was no evidence of lost news uptake for press releases with aligned headlines and claims (ITT 55% vs 55%, OR = 0.7 to 1.3, AT 58% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.7), or causality statements/caveats (ITT 53% vs 56%, OR = 0.8 to 1.0, AT 66% vs 52%, OR = 1.3 to 2.7). Feasibility was demonstrated by a spontaneous increase in cautious headlines, claims and caveats in press releases compared to the pre-trial period (OR = 1.01 to 2.6, 1.3 to 3.4, 1.1 to 26, respectively). News claims-even headlines-can become better aligned with evidence. Cautious claims and explicit caveats about correlational findings may penetrate into news without harming news interest. Findings from AT analysis are correlational and may not imply cause, although here the linking mechanism between press releases and news is known. ITT analysis was insensitive due to spontaneous adoption of interventions across conditions. ISRCTN10492618 (20 August 2015)
This article provides a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics in scholarly publishing, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies.
New study of computer scientists says that when it comes to research output, where Ph.D.s get hired matters more than where they trained.
Increases in APCs is proceeding at a rate three times that which would be expected if APCs were indexed according to inflation. As increasingly ambitious funder mandates are proposed, such as Plan S, it is important to evaluate whether authors show signs of price sensitivity in journal selection by avoiding journals that introduce or increase their APCs.
The thesis argues that the UK governmental policy framework promotes a form of OA that intends to minimise disruption to the publishing industry. The scholar-led ecosystem of presses, in contrast, reflects a diversity of values and struggles that represent a counter-hegemonic alternative to the dominant cultures of OA and publishing more generally.
An open toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about Open Science (OS) and non-OS collaborations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations.
League tables predominantly reward measures of research output, such as publications and citations, and may therefore be promoting poor research practices by encouraging the “publish or perish” mentality. The authors examined whether a league table could be created based on good research practice.
Past studies have shown that faculty at prestigious universities tend to be more productive and prominent than faculty at less prestigious universities. This pattern is usually attributed to a competitive job market that selects inherently productive faculty into prestigious positions. Here, we test the extent to which, instead, faculty's work environments drive their productivity. Using comprehensive data on an entire field of research, we use a matched-pair experimental design to isolate the effects of training at, versus working in, prestigious environments.
There is an often-neglected pre-history of open access that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, including involvement of the humanities and social sciences. Policymakers are advised to keep in mind this separate lineage in the history of open access as the movement goes mainstream.
Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores.
Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money.
A new trend in scientific misconduct involves listing fake coauthors on one’s publication. I trace some of the incentives behind faking coauthors, using them to highlight important changes in global science publishing like the increasingly important source of credibility provided by institutional affiliations, which may begin to function like ‘brands’.
The growth of preprints in the life sciences has been reported widely and is driving policy changes for journals and funders, but little quantitative information has been published about preprint usage. Here, we report how we collected and analyzed data on all 37,648 preprints uploaded to bioRxiv.org, the largest biology-focused preprint server, in its first five years.
Recent reports suggest that there has been an increase in the number of retractions and corrections of published articles due to post-publication detection of problematic data. Moreover, fraudulent data and sloppy science have long-term effects on the scientific literature and subsequent projects based on false and unreproducible claims. The JCI introduced several data screening checks for manuscripts prior to acceptance in an attempt to reduce the number of post-publication corrections and retractions, with the ultimate goal of increasing confidence in the published papers.
The results of this study strongly suggest that when male and female authors publish articles that are comparably positioned to receive citations, their publications do in fact accrue citations at the same rate. This raises the question: Why would gender matter “everywhere but here”?
Survey of undergraduate women finds that most experienced some type of unwanted sexual attention during their physics studies. "A lot of times, people study how women can change to better fit in a field or be more successful. Perhaps physics needs to think about changing itself.”
The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions. In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal. We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.
Although there is growing concern about the urgent need for a better life-work balance when doing science, there are not many examples about how this could be achieved in practice. In this article, 10 simple rules are introduced to make the working environment of research labs more nurturing, collaborative, and people-centered.
Paper finds that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on their reviewing tasks. Articles that had been recommended by a multidisciplinary set of referees were found to receive subsequently more citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline.
This paper investigates the impact of referee reliability on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modeled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias.
