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Articles by Phil Davis
Does Altering A Dataset Merit Retraction?
Some journals have strong data policies. Others do not. For the first group, authors are required to deposit a copy of their dataset (or supporting evidence, like images) into a third-party repository that has a commitment to maintain the integrity of original files. Other journals simply require an author to include a data statement in their paper about what they promise to do.
bioRxiv and Citations: Just Another Piece of Flawed Bibliometric Research?
The title of this post is not the most kind or supportive headline you’d expect from The Scholarly Kitchen these days. Nonetheless, it’s the most succinct summation of everything that will follow in this blog post. So, if you want to skip a nuanced discussion about statistical methodology, bad data, and narrative spin, let’s just leave it at that. This paper is fatally flawed.
Did ChatGPT Just Lie To Me?
To understand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting science publishing, we need to push these systems to their extremes, analyze how they perform, and expose their vulnerabilities. Only then can we discuss how they will transform our industry. Earlier this week, Todd Carpenter asked ChatGPT some generic questions about the potential role of AI in scientific communication and, as you can imagine, it generated some generic, hedged, inoffensive output.
Did ChatGPT Just Lie To Me?
After making up a false claim about a nonexistent study done by the AAAS, the AI software admitted that it made a mistake and then apologized. The post Did ChatGPT Just Lie To Me? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Editors can't spot talent. I've heard this joke before. It isn't funny
Elite medical editors are not good at predicting the citation potential of research manuscripts, a new study concludes. The paper, “Evaluation of editors’ abilities to predict the citation potential of research manuscripts submitted to The BMJ” was written by Sara Schroter and others at the BMJ. It appears in the Christmas issue of The BMJ, an issue traditionally reserved for humorous and satirical research.
Desperately Seeking (Statistical) Significance
Twitter does not increase citations, a reanalysis of author data shows. Did the authors p-hack their data? The post Desperately Seeking (Statistical) Significance appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Desperately Seeking (Statistical) Significance
Mention the name Brian Wansink around Cornell and you’ll make a lot of people uncomfortable. Wansink, a food researcher, was known by his innovative experimental designs and headline-grabbing results. He was also exposed as someone who put good stories ahead of good results, investigated for “p-hacking” his data, and unceremoniously left Cornell in 2018. While his departure was more than four years ago, the damage he did to the reputation of his school and colleagues is still raw.
Fill in the Blank Leads to More Citations
When a reputable journal refuses to get involved with a questionable paper, science looks less like a self-correcting enterprise and more like a way to amass media attention. The post Fill in the Blank Leads to More Citations appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Fill in the Blank Leads to More Citations
Even a casual reader of the scientific literature understands that there is an abundance of papers that link some minor detail with article publishing — say, the presence of a punctuation mark, humor, poetic, or popular song reference in one’s title — with increased citations. Do X and you’ll improve your citation impact, the researchers advise. Over the past few years, the latest trend in X leads to more citations research has focused on minor interventions in social media, like a tweet.
Unpacking The Altmetric Black Box
In March of 2021, in the midst of a lockdown, while most of us were at home spending way too much time on our computers, Altmetric quietly changed its explanation for calculating Article Attention Scores, reducing the weight it placed on Twitter mentions by 75%. No one seemed to notice, except for Kent Anderson, who reported his findings yesterday in The Geyser. Maybe we shouldn’t entirely blame ourselves as Altmetric made these changes without a press release, blog post, or even a tweet.
Journal Citation Indicator. Just Another Tool in Clarivate's Metrics Toolbox?
On May 20, Clarivate Analytics announced that it had created a new metric for comparing the relative citation performance of journals across different disciplines. It calls this metric, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI). Not a very descriptive name, is it?
Sci-Hub Citation Study Confuses Causes With Effects
Journal articles downloaded from Sci-Hub, an illegal site of pirated materials, were cited nearly twice as many times as non-downloaded articles, reports a new paper published online in the journal, Scientometrics. The first author is Juan C. Correa. The study is based on a dataset released by journalist John Bohannon in 2016 that provided counts of papers downloaded from Sci-Hub between September 2015 and February 2016.
Sci-Hub Citation Study Confuses Causes With Effects
Do Sci-Hub downloads cause more citations, or are high impact papers simply downloaded more often? The post Sci-Hub Citation Study Confuses Causes With Effects appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Can An Algorithm Outperform Science Editors?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been creeping into our lives, first taking on complex, but narrow, tasks like optical character recognition or games like chess and Jeopardy. In recent years, the science of AI has advanced to a point where computers are assuming more meaningful and significant roles, like personal assistants for your phone and self-driving cars. A similar game-changing claim was made recently at the Frankfurt Book Fair by Meta, a Canadian startup based in Toronto.
Changing Journal Impact Factor Rules Creates Unfair Playing Field For Some
Transitioning to a model that counts publication based on the date of online publication — instead of print publication — will inflate the next round of Journal Impact Factor (JIF) scores. This is the central take-away from a January 28th press release and full report by Clarivate, the metrics company that publishes the Journal Citation Reports. The next reports are expected in June 2021. The move to a counting model based on the date of electronic publication has been long-expected.
Downloads, Citations, and Positional Effects in the arXiv
List position matters when it comes to readership and citations. That’s the result of an analysis of articles deposited into the arXiv by Cornell professor and inventor of the arXiv, Paul Ginsparg and graduate student Asif-ul Haque. Their article, “Positional effects on citation and readership in arXiv” will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. A copy of the manuscript is available in — where else? — the arXiv.
Changes to Journal Impact Factor Announced for 2021
Earlier this fall, Clarivate Analytics announced that it was moving toward a future that calculated the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) based on the date of electronic publication and not the date of print publication. If your first reaction was “What took you so long!” you are not alone. Online publication dates back to the mid 1990s, with several forward-looking journals hosting some or all of their content on this futuristic thingy known as the World Wide Web.
Tweeting-Citations Authors Speak, Finally
The authors of a much–critiqued study of the beneficial effects of tweeting on citation and altmetrics speak, finally. I say “finally” since my attempts to get the authors to respond to my questions seemed futile. No one was willing to defend the paper, not even the journal’s editorial office. And yet, the authors did finally respond through a Letter to the Editor, published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery on July 20.
Tweeting-Citations Authors Speak, Finally
We stand by our data. We just won't share it or believe that you replicated our study. The post Tweeting-Citations Authors Speak, Finally appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Reanalysis of Tweeting Study Yields No Citation Benefit
In times of controversy, it may be tempting for an author to remain silent and let others speak. Yet in science, silence is often an indication that something has gone awry which cannot be explained. Rather than placating the public, an author’s refusal to speak has just the opposite effect: Silence generates skepticism and undermines trust, not only of the paper itself, but of the authors, their institutions, and the journal that published their work.
Intention to Tweet: Medical Study Reports Tweets Improve Citations
Tweeting by a network of journal social media editors increases citations and Altmetric scores, reports a new paper published in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Not surprisingly, it is also getting a lot of tweets. The study is based on a randomized controlled trial, in which 112 original research papers were assigned to either the intervention arm (receiving tweets and retweets by members of the journals’ social media network delegates) or no intervention at all.
PNAS: Tighter Editorial Policy Improves NAS Papers
After years of slowly tightening its editorial policy, papers contributed by National Academy of Science (NAS) members appear to be performing more like other submissions. PNAS currently allows authors to submit through two tracks: Direct, in which papers are subject to the normal rigors of single-blind peer review, and Contributed, in which a NAS member may secure their own reviews and submit them alongside their paper.
Social Media And Its Impact on Medical Research
Image via jfcherry. Amid the cacophony of a year-end media blitz that bombards us with listicles of the greatest scientific discoveries, the top papers, and the cutest animal stories, we seemed to have missed an important and serious contribution to our understanding of social media and its relationship to scientific publishing.
Data Analysis: How Effective Is TrendMD?
How well does TrendMD work to drive eyeballs and citations to your journal? It depends on how you analyze the data. A recent paper authored by the founders and employees of TrendMD, a recommender system for academic content, reported an overall citation benefit of 50% — a net gain of 5.1 citations within 12 months. I took issue with how the company reported its findings in a way that is consistent with good marketing, just not good science.
Study: Recommender Systems May Increase Citations
Recommender systems that promote related articles across publisher platforms increase citations according to a new study. The paper, “The Citation Advantage of Promoted Articles in a Cross-Publisher Distribution Platform” was published in JASIST online on 23 Dec 2019 by Paul Kudlow, Co-founder of TrendMD. TrendMD is an automated system that operates directly from journal websites to recommend relevant content across the TrendMD network.
Is PLOS Running Out Of Time? Financial Statements Suggest Urgency To Innovate
Time may be running out for the Public Library of Science (PLOS). The San Francisco-based, non-profit open access (OA) publisher released its latest financials, disclosing that it ran a US $5.5 million dollar deficit in 2018 on $32M dollars of revenue. In order to cover this loss, it dug deep into its savings and sold off nearly $5M in financial investments. This is not the first time the publisher spent more than it earned.
Nature's Foray Into Full Open Access Journals
Last week, Nature Publishing announced their latest foray into fully open access publishing with a new journal called Scientific Reports. Similar in scope to Nature Communications, Scientific Reports will accept papers covering all of the natural sciences — the biomedical and physical sciences. The latter have not been well-represented in the open access journal market. But the similarities stop there. Nature Communication is based on a subscription model that allows authors an open access option.
Can Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social Media Drive Downloads, Citations?
Prologue: A very brief history of media effects Even before the development of the Internet and social media tools, the association between media promotion and article performance was well documented.1, 2, 3, 4 What was not fully understood, however, was the underlying cause of this association. Editors and journalists tend to promote what they view as the most important and novel papers.
Post-publication Review: Is the Dialog of Science Really a Monologue?
It has never been easier to post a comment to a scientific article. Just don’t expect an adequate reply from the author — or one at all — according to a new study of scientific comments left on BMJ articles. The article, “Adequacy of authors’ replies to criticism raised in electronic letters to the editor: cohort study” was published on August 10th in the medical journal BMJ. Its lead author, Peter C. Gøtzsche, is director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre.
Poor Financials Pushes PLOS To Ponder Future Prospects
2017 was not a good financial year for the Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS’ most recent 2017 financial overview, released on 12 December 2018, depicts an organization trying to reinvent itself, focusing less on disruption and innovation and more on efficiency and collaboration. Revenue at PLOS was down by nearly US $2 Million in 2017, largely the result of declines in submissions to PLOS ONE, its largest journal, according to the report.
Oh, What A Tangled Web! Citation Network Underscores Editorial Conflicts of Interest
The separation of powers is as important in academic publishing as it is in government. If readers are to trust the integrity of the editorial and peer review process, editors need to be insulated from the business of publishing, which often means keeping them away from their colleagues in marketing, sales, and advertising. So important is the separation of powers that some publishers physically separate editorial offices from business operations and place them in different cities.
Skeletons In Their Closet: Clarivate Issues Editorial Concern But Takes No Further Action
A public allegation of citation manipulation among 5 journals deserves a public inquiry. The post Skeletons In Their Closet: Clarivate Issues Editorial Concern But Takes No Further Action appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Skeletons In Their Closet: Clarivate Issues Editorial Concern But Takes No Further Action
Update: On 20 June 2019 Clarivate issued an update to their Editorial Expression of Concern, suppressing three ASP journals (Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters, Journal of Biobased Materials and Bioenergy, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology) along with Bone Research. When Bone Research received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in 2014 (a meager score of 1.310), it didn’t receive much notice.
Statistics and Storytelling - Why We Need Them Both in Science
Two thought-provoking articles published last week in JAMA make compelling and complementary arguments to the rhetorical power of both numbers and words in conveying the message of science. The first, “Reporting of Effect Direction and Size in Abstracts of Systematic Reviews,” by Elaine Beller and others, looks at the reporting of statistical results in the abstracts of reviews that contain meta-analyses. Meta-analyses are important in medicine for synthesizing the research literature.
Tipping the Scales: Is Impact Factor Suppression Biased Against Small Fields?
Earlier this summer, three economic history journals were suppressed from the 2017 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), the annual metrics source that reports Journal Impact Factors along with other citation metrics. The three journals were the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET), The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) and the History of Economic Ideas (HEI).
Robert Harington argues that academic societies need to balance mission and business more effectively. There is nothing wrong with developing a mixed publishing economy that best suits a range of communities and types of business.
I read with interest the recent Scholarly Kitchen Guest Post entitled “Why a Society Publisher is Moving Toward Read and Publish Models” by Emma Wilson of the Royal Society of Chemistry on their adoption of the Read and Publish model. The article was well written and cogent, but with one significant flaw – a fundamental dissonance between mission and publishing business sense that denudes the argument.
Should Open Access Journals Charge Submission Fees?
Would open access journals be better off if they charged submission fees? A recent report, “Submission Fees – A tool in the transition to open access?“ by Mark Ware for Knowledge Exchange, provides a complex answer to a seemingly simple question: It depends.
Elsevier Published Fake Journals
According to the magazine The Scientist, the publishing giant Elseiver admitted to publishing six fake medical journals between 2000 and 2005. These “journals” were all sponsored by pharmaceutical companies but lacked proper disclosure of sponsorship. The initial finding, released on April 30 in The Scientist, involved the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication which was paid for by Merck.
Impact Factor Denied to 20 Journals For Self-Citation, Stacking
This year, Clarivate Analytics, publishers of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), suppressed 20 journals, 14 for high levels of self-citation and six for citation stacking — a pattern known informally as a “citation cartel.” In addition, it assigned an Editorial Expression of Concern to five journals after it became aware of citation anomalies following the completion of the 2018 report. Suppression from the JCR lasts one year.
How Much Editorial Misconduct Goes Unreported?
COPE Case #18-03, “Editors and reviewers requiring authors to cite their own work” reads like a political thriller: Working alone late one night, a staffer stumbles upon a decision letter in which a handling editor instructs an author to cite some of his papers. Intrigued, the staffer digs deeper and finds a pattern of systematic abuse that involves a gang of crony reviewers willing to do the handling editor’s misdeeds and evidence of strong-arming authors who put up any resistance.
Journal Growth Lowers Impact Factor
We usually think of journal growth as a good thing. Growth means you are attracting more manuscripts, more authors, and more attention. But journal growth can have a negative effect on citation performance measures, especially on the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). This blog post explains why. The JIF is one of many citation indicators that measure the performance of journals. Clarivate Analytics will release 2017 JIF scores as part of its Journal Citations Reports sometime in the middle of June 2018.
Culture Trumps Technology: The UC Berkeley Scholarly Communication Report
Culture trumps technology. This is main message of a five-year study into the values, motivations, and communication behaviors of scholars and their associates at research institutions across the United States.
Journals Lose Citations to Preprint Servers
Type the word “bioRxiv” into into Google’s search box, and the first autocomplete suggestion is biorxiv impact factor. Number three is biorxiv journal. To be clear, bioRxiv is not a journal, but a preprint server. It is not indexed by the Web of Science and, more importantly, has never received an Impact Factor. At the same time, Google’s algorithm has discerned that enough users have searched for bioRxiv’s Impact Factor to suggest the result.
Amazon Peer Review: Coming To A Preprint Near You
Starting today, anyone shopping on Amazon will soon be able to review manuscripts, just like pens, sneakers, and toiletry products. Supporters of Amazon Peer Review™ believe that their simple 5-star rating system and unstructured comment boxes will greatly expand the community that participates in the review of scientific research. Amazon Peer Review™ works by linking Amazon’s online store to bioRxiv, a rapidly expanding source for preprints in the biomedical sciences.
Badges? We Don't Need No Stinking Preprint Badges! - The Scholarly Kitchen
Authors submitting papers to PLOS journals can now opt to transfer their manuscript automatically to the bioRxiv preprint server, according to a joint press release issued on February 6. In this arrangement, the publisher (PLOS) will perform the initial screening, which includes checking for plagiarism, previous publication, scope, ethical, and technical criteria before manuscripts are transferred to bioRxiv.
Future of the OA Megajournal - The Scholarly Kitchen
On June 1st, 2011, Peter Binfield, then publisher of PLOS ONE, made a bold and shocking prediction at the Society of Scholarly Publishing annual meeting: I believe we have entered the era of the OA mega journal,” adding, “Some basic modeling predicts that in 2016, almost 50% of the STM literature could be published in approximately 100 mega journals…Content will rapidly concentrate into a small number of very large titles.
PLOS Reports $1.7M Loss In 2016 - The Scholarly Kitchen
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) reported a loss of 1.7 Million $US in 2016, according to their latest financial disclosure, which was released late last week. The loss for the San Francisco-based non-profit publisher was not unexpected. In 2015, the publisher barely broke even, netting around half a million US dollars after expenses, down from nearly $5 Million in 2014 and over $10 Million in 2013.
Support Science by Publishing in Scientific Society Journals - The Scholarly Kitchen
Microbiology is a growing field, nevertheless, a shrinking proportion of papers are being published in society-sponsored journals, a recent analysis of PubMed records reveals.
Portable Peer Review RIP - The Scholarly Kitchen
The promise of portable peer review took a fatal blow earlier this year as Rubriq, the company that began a radical experiment to disrupt the peer review process, quietly closed its service after years of unremarkable uptake. When I last reported on Rubriq earlier this year, just 30 manuscripts were reviewed over the prior three months.
Do We Need A Self-Citation Index?
Everyone cites themselves. It is normal, acceptable academic behavior for anyone who has published more than one paper, a way of building upon one’s prior work and the work of one’s colleagues. So why is self-citation getting such a bad rap these days? In a recently published paper appearing in the journal, Publications, Justin Flatt and others argue for the creation of a self-citation index for measuring and reporting the extent of author self-citation.
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