A recent study concerning the visibility of Latin American scholarly output in open access repositories reveals their poor indexing in Google and Google Scholar. The technical reasons for these problems, which affect the visibility of Latin-American research which, for the most part, is not indexed in either in WoS or Scopus, are explained in this post. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – good and bad scientific practices
III BRISPE: Brazilian Meeting on Research Integrity, Science and Publication Ethics, sponsored by FAPESP, was the third event held in Brazil with the objective to promote institutional policies and practices of ethical research integrity and responsible conduct. With the presence of several prestigious guests from developed countries, the education strategies to new scientists were analyzed as well as how to reduce bad practices such falsification of data, plagiarism, conflict of interests, manipulation of results, etc. … Read More →
Profile of researchers that integrate the core of world science publishing
A limited number of researchers all over the world can keep a continuous and uninterrupted flow of publications over time. This ability is shared by only 1% of researchers, who form the core of most productive and cited scientists. The inability to maintain this flow is translated into less scientific impact. … Read More →
What can alternative metrics – or altmetrics – offer us?
The results and comments in four articles dedicated to altmetrics and published in an issue of EPI are analyzed. They show future possibilities and the real difficulties in the development of a new technique for the measurement of the impact of research based on social networks on the web. … Read More →
The SciELO journals are being improved by the adoption of classic workflows relating to the online management of article submissions
Together with the journals that it indexes, SciELO is fostering the improvement of the management of the evaluation of article submissions in order to help overcome the various difficulties faced by the journals, and to strengthen the transparency of the processes. Part of this initiative is the use of automated management systems that organize the functions of the parties involved in the evaluation of article submissions, allow for the monitoring of the workflows and provide statistics on the corresponding activities, with a view to steering the systematic improvement of the processes. This post analyzes three classic workflows in the automated management of article submissions adopted by a group of SciELO journals whose promising results show the viability of SciELO’s strategy. … Read More →
Author credits …. Credited for what?
When the publication of a scientific article has been the joint responsibility of dozens of people, the following questions can arise: Who is the author? How is credit apportioned? and Does everyone have the same level of responsibility? A recent editorial in Nature puts forward a taxonomy which can be used to categorize the different roles which come together to make up the concept of authorship. It is interesting to make a comparison with how the film industry addresses this issue when apportioning credits in the awarding of Oscars. … Read More →
The Open Data movement: international consolidation
The open data movement – the availability of scientific research data for preservation, searching, using and citing – is gaining followers in all sectors of the academic world, and with editors, publishers, research institutions and funding agencies. The movement will allow greater interoperability, transparency, visibility and research impact, in addition to ensuring the digital preservation of the original data that would otherwise have a tendency to be lost or become inaccessible with the passage of time. … Read More →
South America science in Nature
The celebrated journal Nature devotes a special section of its June 11 issue to an analysis of South American research output, highlighting areas of excellence and innovation which are internationally recognized, and fields of collaboration with other countries both inside and outside the region. The articles in this section stress the economic and infrastructural inequalities within the region, as well as the low levels of investment in research and development, and point to FAPESP as a successful model of investment directly linked to a state’s GDP. … Read More →
What are the Public Library of Science Collections ? – Part II
This post is the second part of the description of the contents of the PLOS Collections. Of the seven collections that makeup PLOS Collections, the Text Mining and Altmetrics collections have been selected for a brief analysis of their contents and their importance to scientometrics and information science, and of the growth of these disciplines that are bolstered by free access to full text. … Read More →
What are the Public Library of Science Collections ? – Part I
The PLOS Collections contain selected documents published in open access in seven subject disciplines. The contents and importance of these collections to the past, present and future of open access is briefly presented, as well as the growth of the disciplines of Text Mining and Altmetrics, stimulated by the open access to full text. … Read More →
What is the decline of the elite journals?
According to a study by Vincent Larivière of the Université de Montréal, there was an exponential increase in the number of articles published in the elite journals. However, it is now required twice the number of citations than in previous decades for an article to be in the top 5% with higher impact, and that these articles are distributed amongst a wider base of titles because authors have more independence in choosing where they publish. … Read More →
Ethical Publishing – the time line of a case of plagiarism
The most advanced research, which is published in elite journals such as Nature, is not beyond plagiarism or serious misconduct. In a recent case in stem cell research at Weseda University in Japan, the university ordered a review of the 280 theses produced at the RIKEN Institute since its founding in 2007. … Read More →
Non-native English-speaking authors and editors evaluate difficulties and challenges in publishing in international journals
Due to linguistic and cultural barriers, authors in emerging economies have faced challenges in having their papers accepted in main stream journals. A study conducted on international editors and authors in non-English speaking countries shows that good research results can be prejudiced by poor writing and difficulties with the language. … Read More →
Scientometrics of peer-reviewers – will they be finally recognized?
ORCID and CASRAI have initiated a project to establish a set of standard procedures to recognize the work of peer-reviewers. In this way the important work of peer-review, almost always anonymous, will be counted in the acknowledgments and be incorporated into scientometric indicators and altmetrics. But this will depend upon a sufficient level of adoption and acceptance of the procedures. … Read More →
Study highlights academic journal publication models in Brazil and Spain
Brazil and Spain have a commanding profile in academic output in their respective regions, and possess great potential in the field of scholarly publishing. Notwithstanding the differences in the history of scientific development between the two countries, both have a similar number of journals in the Web of Science database and have developed successful open access models. This article highlights a study carried out by researchers from those two countries and gives an outline of these programs and the reasons behind their success. … Read More →
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