bims-skolko Biomed News
on Scholarly communication
Issue of 2020–09–13
twelve papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society
  1. Development of a Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Undergraduate Research Journal.
  2. Motivations for performing scholarly prepublication peer review: A scoping review.
  3. Open Access, Plan S, and researchers' needs.
  4. Analysis of potential predatory journals in radiology.
  5. More than 100 scientific journals have disappeared from the Internet.
  6. Scholarly Publishing in the Wake of COVID-19.
  7. Publishing volumes in major databases related to Covid-19.
  8. Curating more diverse scientific conferences.
  9. Screening for plagiarism in psychiatric research: Similarity scores are not all the same.
  10. Statistical Reporting in Nursing Research: Addressing a Common Error in Reporting of p Values (p = .000).
  11. BMC Biomedical Engineering: a home for all biomedical engineering research.
  12. Benefit-Risk Assessment of Vaccines. Part II: Proposal Towards Consolidated Standards of Reporting Quantitative Benefit-Risk Models Applied to Vaccines (BRIVAC).
  1. J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2020 ;pii: 21.2.62. [Epub ahead of print]21(2):
    Development of a Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Undergraduate Research Journal.
    Evelyn Sun, Julia A Huggins, Kirstin L Brown, Rozlyn C T Boutin, William D Ramey, Marcia L Graves, David C Oliver.
      Dissemination of results is a fundamental aspect of the scientific process and requires an avenue for publication that is specifically designed to suit the nature of the research being communicated. Undergraduate research journals provide a unique forum for students to report scientific findings and ideas while learning about the complete scientific process. We have developed a peer-reviewed, open-access, international undergraduate research journal that is linked to a course-based undergraduate research experience. We reflect on lessons learned and recommend effective approaches for the implementation and operation of a successful undergraduate research journal.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v21i2.2151
  2. Account Res. 2020 Sep 09.
    Motivations for performing scholarly prepublication peer review: A scoping review.
    Mersiha Mahmić-Kaknjo, Ana Utrobičić, Ana Marušić.
      Prepublication peer review is a cornerstone of science. Overburdened reviewers invest millions of hours in this voluntary activity. In this scoping review, we aimed at identifying motivations for performing prepublication peer review of scholarly manuscripts. Original research studies investigating actual peer reviewers' motivations were included. We excluded modelling studies, studies related to other types of peer review, guidelines, peer review processes in particular journals. Medline, WoS and Scopus were searched in February 2016, no language or time limitations; search updated in July 2019. The search yielded 5250 records; 382 chosen for full text analysis, out of which 10 appropriate for synthesis. Reference snowballing identified one eligible study. 11 studies appropriate for synthesis: 4 qualitative, 4 mixed-qualitative/quantitative and 3 qualitative studies, published from 1998 to 2018, involving 6667 respondents. Major internal incentive was "communal obligations and reciprocity". Major external incentives were "career advancement", "being recognized as an expert" and "building relationships with journals and editors". Major disincentive was the "lack of time". Editors could incentivize peer review process by choosing highest quality papers, improving communication with peer reviewers, in order to make the process of peer review as short and efficient as possible. The gaps in research concern disincentives to review.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1822170
  3. EMBO Rep. 2020 Sep 07. e51568
    Open Access, Plan S, and researchers' needs.
    Shina Caroline Lynn Kamerlin.
      Mandates with the aim to enforce Open Access publishing, such as Plan S, need to respect researchers' needs and should contribute to the broader goal of Open Science.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.202051568
  4. Diagn Interv Radiol. 2020 Sep;26(5): 498-503
    Analysis of potential predatory journals in radiology.
    Serkan Arıbal, Okan İnce, Eyüp Kaya, Hakan Önder.
       PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to determine the presence and evaluate the features of potential predatory journals in the radiology field.
    METHODS: The presence of the keywords related to radiology listed in the name of journals was investigated in Beall's list. We have searched and recorded the features and the information of the included journals listed under the following headings: address and location, publishing features, editorial board, indexing features, submission, and peer-review processes.
    RESULTS: A total of 66 radiology journals from 27 publishers were identified from the updated version of the original Beall's list. Regarding the publishers, 33 journals (50%) reported an address in the United States of America, while others were from United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, Iran, and Canada. While 44 journals' (67%) website reported a contact address, no addresses were declared in the website of 21 journals (32%). The median time of publication activity was 3.5 years (interquartile range [IQR], 1-5 years; range, 0-16 years). Thirty-five journals (53%) indicated their publication ethics policy on the website. Forty-seven (71%) journals reported a regular editorial board (EB) list. The competency of the EB was considered as "inappropriate" in 27 (41%) journals. Only 18% of the total number of EB members had affiliations related to radiology (n=286/1566). Forty journals (61%) did not report any indexing and database coverage. We found 26 journals (39%) which had a DOI number in its latest 5 articles. Fifty-nine (89%) journals clearly reported article processing change (APC) on the webpage. The median APC value was 641.43 USD (IQR, 300-918.75 USD; range, 100-2588 USD). Considering the latest 5 articles, the number of journals with radiologic images in all of the articles was 8 (12%). Mean peer-review time was 63.5 days (IQR, 21.75-87.5 days; range, 1-237 days) for the journals which indicated the submission and acceptance dates clearly.
    CONCLUSION: We demonstrated the several main characteristics of potential predatory journals in the radiology field such as reliability of the reported address, APC, publication frequencies, indexing features, features of published article and peer-review time which were all found to be similar to the characteristics of potential predatory journals in other biomedical fields.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.5152/dir.2020.20240
  5. Nature. 2020 Sep 10.
    More than 100 scientific journals have disappeared from the Internet.
    Diana Kwon.
      
    Keywords:  Publishing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02610-z
  6. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2020 Oct 01. pii: S0360-3016(20)31335-3. [Epub ahead of print]108(2): 491-495
    Scholarly Publishing in the Wake of COVID-19.
    Robert C Miller, C Jillian Tsai.
      The speed at which the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe and the accompanying need to rapidly disseminate knowledge have highlighted the inadequacies of the traditional research/publication cycle, particularly the slowness and the fragmentary access globally to manuscripts and their findings. Scholarly communication has slowly been undergoing transformational changes since the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s. The pandemic response has created an urgency that has accelerated these trends in some areas. The magnitude of the global emergency has strongly bolstered calls to make the entire research and publishing lifecycle transparent and open. The global scientific community has collaborated in rapid, open, and transparent means that are unprecedented. The general public has been reminded of the important of science, and trusted communication of scientific findings, in everyday life. In addition to COVID-19-driven innovation in scholarly communication, alternative bibliometrics and artificial intelligence tools will further transform academic publishing in the near future.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrobp.2020.06.048
  7. Scientometrics. 2020 Aug 28. 1-12
    Publishing volumes in major databases related to Covid-19.
    Jaime A Teixeira da Silva, Panagiotis Tsigaris, Mohammadamin Erfanmanesh.
      The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, induced a global pandemic for which an effective cure, either in the form of a drug or vaccine, has yet to be discovered. In the few brief months that the world has known Covid-19, there has been an unprecedented volume of papers published related to this disease, either in a bid to find solutions, or to discuss applied or related aspects. Data from Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, and Elsevier's Scopus, which do not index preprints, were assessed. Our estimates indicate that 23,634 unique documents, 9960 of which were in common to both databases, were published between January 1 and June 30, 2020. Publications include research articles, letters, editorials, notes and reviews. As one example, amongst the 21,542 documents in Scopus, 47.6% were research articles, 22.4% were letters, and the rest were reviews, editorials, notes and other. Based on both databases, the top three countries, ranked by volume of published papers, are the USA, China, and Italy while BMJ, Journal of Medical Virology and The Lancet published the largest number of Covid-19-related papers. This paper provides one snapshot of how the publishing landscape has evolved in the first six months of 2020 in response to this pandemic and discusses the risks associated with the speed of publications.
    Keywords:  Acceptance and rejection; Biomedicine; Correction of the literature; Open access; Peer review; Preprints; Retractions; SARS-CoV-2 virus
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03675-3
  8. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2020 Sep 08.
    Curating more diverse scientific conferences.
    Anne-Marie M Oswald, Srdjan Ostojic.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-020-0373-4
  9. J Psychiatr Res. 2020 Aug 27. pii: S0022-3956(20)30946-8. [Epub ahead of print]131 31-32
    Screening for plagiarism in psychiatric research: Similarity scores are not all the same.
    Brian J Miller.
      
    Keywords:  Editor; Plagiarism; Publishing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.08.034
  10. J Nurs Scholarsh. 2020 Sep 05.
    Statistical Reporting in Nursing Research: Addressing a Common Error in Reporting of p Values (p = .000).
    Yanni Wu, Chunlan Zhou, Run Wang, Xiaoling Ye, Lixiao Yang, Chaixiu Li, Mingyu Hu, Weilian Cong.
       PURPOSE: The confidence in a study will be reduced due to the incorrect representation of statistical results. However, it is unknown to what extent p values are incorrectly represented in published nursing journals. The study aims to evaluate the articles in 30 nursing journals in terms of the error in reporting of p values (p = .000).
    DESIGN AND METHODS: This was a bibliometric analysis. All papers published in 10 leading nursing journals (between 2015 and 2019), the 10 bottom nursing journals (2019), and 10 selected key nursing journals (2019) indexed in the Science Citation Index Journal Citation Reports were reviewed to detect errors in reporting of p values (p = .000).
    RESULTS: A total of 3,788 papers were reviewed. Notably, it was found that 93.3% (28/30) of the nursing journals contained incorrect representation of p values (p = .000). The reporting rate of these journals ranges from 0% to 57.1%, with an overall rate of 12.8% (486/3,788). In addition, the rate of incorrect representation of p values (p = .000) showed no statistically significant difference between different publication years (Χ2 = 4.976, p = .290). However, the rate of reporting was different between study types, journals, and regions (p = .007, p = .020, and p < .001, respectively).
    CONCLUSIONS: The incorrect representation of p values is common in nursing journals.
    CLINICAL RELEVANCE: We recommend that both publishers and researchers be responsible for preventing statistical errors in manuscripts. Furthermore, various kinds of statistical training methods should be adopted to ensure that nurses and journal reviewers have enough statistical literacy.
    Keywords:  Medical research; nursing journals; p values; statistical science
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12595
  11. BMC Biomed Eng. 2019 ;1 1
    BMC Biomedical Engineering: a home for all biomedical engineering research.
    Alexandros Houssein, Alan Kawarai Lefor, Antonio Veloso, Zhi Yang, Jong Chul Ye, Dimitrios I Zeugolis, Sang Yup Lee.
      This editorial accompanies the launch of BMC Biomedical Engineering, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal within the BMC series, which seeks to publish articles on all aspects of biomedical engineering. As one of the first engineering journals within the BMC series portfolio, it will support and complement existing biomedical communities, but at the same time, it will provide an open access home for engineering research. By publishing original research, methodology, database, software and review articles, BMC Biomedical Engineering will disseminate quality research, with a focus on studies that further the understanding of human disease and that contribute towards the improvement of human health.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1186/s42490-019-0004-1
  12. Drug Saf. 2020 Sep 12.
    Benefit-Risk Assessment of Vaccines. Part II: Proposal Towards Consolidated Standards of Reporting Quantitative Benefit-Risk Models Applied to Vaccines (BRIVAC).
    Hugo Arlegui, Kaatje Bollaerts, Vincent Bauchau, Gaëlle Nachbaur, Bernard Bégaud, Nicolas Praet.
       INTRODUCTION: Quantitative benefit-risk models (qBRm) applied to vaccines are increasingly used by public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies as an important tool to help decision makers with supporting benefit-risk assessment (BRA). However, many publications on vaccine qBRm provide insufficient details on the methodological approaches used. Incomplete and/or inadequate qBRm reporting may affect result interpretation and confidence in BRA, highlighting a need for the development of standard reporting guidance.
    OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to provide an operational checklist for improved reporting of vaccine qBRm.
    METHODS: The consolidated standards of reporting quantitative Benefit-RIsk models applied to VACcines (BRIVAC) were designed as a checklist of key information to report in qBRm scientific publications regarding the assessed vaccines, the methodological considerations and the results and their interpretation.
    RESULTS: In total, 22 items and accompanying definitions, recommendations, explanations and examples were provided and divided into six main sections corresponding to the classic subdivisions of a scientific publication: title and abstract (items 1-2), introduction (items 3-4), methods (items 5-15), results (items 16-17), discussion (items 18-20) and other (items 21-22).
    CONCLUSIONS: The BRIVAC checklist is the first initiative providing an operational checklist for improved reporting of qBRm applied to vaccines in scientific articles. It is intended to assist authors, peer-reviewers, editors and readers in their critical appraisal. Future initiatives are needed to provide methodological guidance to perform qBRm while taking into account the vaccine specificities.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-020-00982-9
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