1,721,605 research outputs found
Following Cochrane review protocols to completion 10 years later: a retrospective cohort study and author survey
No full textWe analyzed patterns of publication of Cochrane review protocols (CRPs)
The authors respond to "Rigorous policies ensure integrity of NLM literature databases"
No full textAn important goal of the Analysis by Manca and Colleagues (1) was to ignite a thoughtful debate on the perilous issue of predatory journals contaminating trusted sources of information, such as legitimate biomedical databases. Feedback from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the ideal starting point for the discussion to begin, for which we thank Dr. Topper and Colleagues for their recent commentary (2).
The topic, how journals are included in PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) and, more broadly, the multi-layered PubMed and NLM policies, is too complex and articulated to be comprehensively and concisely summarized and, was beyond the remit of our analysis (1). However, we do not believe we made incorrect statements about PubMed and NLM policies; we do not question either the rigorous assessment of scientific and editorial quality of journals that apply to PMC or the election criteria used by NLM to re-evaluate previously accepted journals. Our point is that ‘predators’ continue to appear in PubMed, despite the profound commitment of NLM towards the integrity of its literature databases. Thus, regardless of whether it is the journal or only one or more individual journal articles to appear in PubMed/PMC, as Topper and Colleagues objected (2), the result is the same: the items are displayed jointly and achieve global exposure and are interpreted by readers, including patients, as trustworthy.
We understand that to operate in such challenging times in the scholarly publishing environment is undoubtedly very complex. However, this quicksand should not discourage from continuing to work to secure PubMed from contamination by the outputs of deceptive journals and publishers
Citations and metrics of journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns: the GhoS(t)copus Project
Full text linkBackground: Scopus is a leading bibliometric database. It contains a large part of the articles cited in peer-reviewed publications . The journals included in Scopus are periodically re-evaluated to ensure they meet indexing criteria and some journals might be discontinued for 'publication concerns'. Previously published articles may remain indexed and can be cited. Their metrics have yet to be studied. This study aimed to evaluate the main features and metrics of journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns, before and after their discontinuation, and to determine the extent of predatory journals among the discontinued journals. Methods: We surveyed the list of discontinued journals from Scopus (July 2019). Data regarding metrics, citations and indexing were extracted from Scopus or other scientific databases, for the journals discontinued for publication concerns. Results: A total of 317 journals were evaluated. Ninety-three percent of the journals (294/317) declared they published using an Open Access model. The subject areas with the greatest number of discontinued journals were Medicine (52/317; 16%), Agriculture and Biological Science (34/317; 11%), and Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics (31/317; 10%). The mean number of citations per year after discontinuation was significantly higher than before (median of difference 16.89 citations, p<0.0001), and so was the number of citations per document (median of difference 0.42 citations, p<0.0001). Twenty-two percent (72/317) were included in the Cabell's blacklist. The DOAJ currently included only 9 journals while 61 were previously included and discontinued, most for 'suspected editorial misconduct by the publisher'. Conclusions: Journals discontinued for 'publication concerns' continue to be cited despite discontinuation and predatory behaviour seemed common. These citations may influence scholars' metrics prompting artificial career advancements, bonus systems and promotion. Countermeasures should be taken urgently to ensure the reliability of Scopus metrics for the purpose of scientific assessment of scholarly publishing at both journal- and author-level
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Umbrella-Review, Evaluation, Analysis, and Communication Hub (U-REACH): a novel living umbrella review knowledge translation approach
No full textSystematic reviews and meta-analyses have become crucial for evidence-based decision-making in recent decades. However, it is common for the results of multiple reviews on the same topic to be inconsistent, and it is widely recognized that the results of the reviews are not always effectively communicated to health care professionals and the lay public. This manuscript proposes a strategy to summarize and communicate the findings of previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses to wider audiences. The proposed approach couples the findings of umbrella reviews with the creation of open-access online platforms that present the results of these umbrella reviews in an accessible way to various stakeholders. The key potential methodological avenues of this approach are presented, and specific examples from the author's own works and those from other teams are provided. An accompanying website (https://u-reach.org/) has been designed to present this U-REACH approach and to overcome the technical challenges associated with this type of project (by sharing the code used to build existing U-REACH projects). The present document is intended to serve as a methodological and technical guide for the creation of large-scale projects designed to synthesize and disseminate scientific information to a broad audience
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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