Search results

Authorship is the ultimate status of intellectual recognition in academic publishing. Although fairly robust guidelines have already been in place for a considerable amount of time regarding authorship criteria and credit, such as those by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors or Contributor Roles Taxonomy, the lack of reliable verification techniques hamper their accuracy, thereby reducing the validity of authorship claims in such statements. This paper aims to focus on the authorship status and responsibilities of co-first authors and co-corresponding authors.

To appreciate authorship responsibilities in this subset of authors, the broader academic authorship literature, as well as position statements, rules and guidelines, were consulted.

Academic publishing that relies on metrics is a global multi-billion-dollar business, so strict measures to assess and confirm authorship, which can be intellectually or financially “profitable” among academics that game such metrics, are needed. The current assessment is that there are inconsistent rules for equally credited authors such as co-first authors, co-corresponding authors and co-supervisors. In shared and collaborative authorship, there are also shared authorship-related responsibilities, but these are infrequently discussed, or tend to only be dealt with broadly.

Within the wider, and important, discussion about authorship, which is one of the most central issues in academic publishing, there has been a limited focus on equally credited authors such as co-first authors, co-corresponding authors and co-supervisors. This paper expands and fortifies that discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the creation of safe academic (education and research) environments that offer proper protections to adult academics and staff, so that academia and society at large may benefit from the fruits of safe workplaces. Not all academic environments are entirely safe, and there are recorded cases of victims of harassment and sexual abuse.

Given that co-workers in a laboratory, or research subjects in a research project, may be victims of harassment or sexual abuse, and that the same individuals may then become co-authors or anonymized research subjects, respectively, in academic papers, there is a need to appreciate what structural protection exists for such victims at the post-publication level. What should academia do with the literature of legally recognized sex offenders who have published in peer-reviewed and indexed academic journals?

Currently, there is no specific guidance by ethics organizations (e.g., Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) to deal with this issue, so protective mechanisms for adult victims, as well as punitive measures against perpetrators at the post-publication stage, are needed.

There may be career-altering repercussions – personal, professional and reputational – for co-authors of legally recognized sex offenders in papers published in peer-reviewed and indexed journals. There may also be life-altering outcomes to victims of sexual abuse who are the study subjects of such papers. Thus, a robust form of post-publication protection (and justice) based on unbiased and independent ethical and legal investigations, coordinated by editors, publishers and research institutes, needs to be established.

This paper aims to compare guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals regarding six scientific fields (according to Croatian classification) and to show the representation of technical and ethical issues that are explained in guidelines for authors.

The aim of the research is to identify elements that are included in guidelines for authors in Croatian scholarly journals from all scientific fields. Fourteen parameters for 200 journals were analyzed (all the journals that had published at least one 2016 issue by the end of February 2017).

The parameter that is explained in the most journals is the length of the manuscript (91.5 per cent). The lowest number of journals explains Open Researcher and Contributor ID (1.5 per cent). The highest percentage of journals that explain plagiarism is in the field of natural sciences (44 per cent). As compared to the results of previous researches, there is an increase in the number of ethical questions mentioned in the guidelines for authors of Croatian scholarly journals.

This paper provides recommendations and suggestions that could help journal editors make guidelines for authors more informative. That could help in advancing editorial process (e.g. peer review process) and in avoiding misconducts (e.g. plagiarism or false attribution of authorship).

This paper is the first detailed content analysis of guidelines for authors in all Croatian scholarly journals.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the research contributions of authors and subauthors in order to outline how authorship, as opposed to acknowledgment, is awarded in the lab-based life sciences.

The work tasks described in author contribution statements and acknowledgments sections of research articles published in Nature Chemical Biology were classified according to a three-layered taxonomy: core layer; middle layer; outer layer.

Most authors are core or middle layer contributors, i.e. they perform at least one core or middle layer task. In contrast, most subauthors are outer layer contributors. While authors tend to be involved in several tasks, subauthors tend to make single contributions. The small but significant share of authors performing only outer layer tasks suggests a disconnect in author attribution between traditional author guidelines and scientific practice. A level of arbitrariness in whether a contributor is awarded authorship or subauthorship status is reported. However, this does not implicate first or last authorships.

Data from one journal only are used. Transferability is limited to research in high impact journals in the lab-based life sciences.

The growth in scientific collaboration underlines the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the distinction between authorship and subauthorship in terms of the types of research contributions that they de facto represent. By utilizing hitherto unexplored data sources this study addresses a gap in the literature, and gives an important insight into the reward system of science.

The purpose of this study is to assess the opportunity for a distributed, networked open biomedical repository (OBR) using a knowledge management system (KMS) conceptual framework. An innovative KMS conceptual framework is proposed to guide the transition from a traditional, siloed approach to a sustainable OBR.

This paper reports on a cycle of action research, involving literature review, interviews and focus group with leaders in biomedical research, open science and librarianship, and an audit of elements needed for an Australasian OBR; these, along with an Australian KM standard, informed the resultant KMS framework.

The proposed KMS framework aligns the requirements for an OBR with the people, process, technology and content elements of the KM standard. It identifies and defines nine processes underpinning biomedical knowledge – discovery, creation, representation, classification, storage, retrieval, dissemination, transfer and translation. The results comprise an explanation of these processes and examples of the people, process, technology and content dimensions of each process. While the repository is an integral cog within the collaborative, distributed open science network, its effectiveness depends on understanding the relationships and linkages between system elements and achieving an appropriate balance between them.

The current research has focused on biomedicine. This research builds on the worldwide effort to reduce barriers, in particular paywalls to health knowledge. The findings present an opportunity to rationalize and improve a KMS integral to biomedical knowledge.

Adoption of the KMS framework for a distributed, networked OBR will facilitate open science through reducing duplication of effort, removing barriers to the flow of knowledge and ensuring effective management of biomedical knowledge.

Achieving quality, permanency and discoverability of a region’s digital assets is possible through ongoing usage of the framework for researchers, industry and consumers.

The framework demonstrates the dependencies and interplay of elements and processes to frame an OBR KMS.

From the very beginning of medical practice, physicians have enjoyed a degree of autonomy which exceeds that of almost any other profession. Although regulated by state medical boards, and limited by the threat of litigation, physicians are generally held in high esteem by society and allowed to practice medicine as they see fit. Physicians have usually been allowed to prescribe any drug for any disease, including the so-called “off-label” uses for which Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval has not been obtained. They can also use new or untested medical devices and surgical procedures, as long as they obtain informed consent from the patient. Society has trusted doctors to do the right thing for their patients, and thus tried not to interfere with the sacred doctor–patient relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a flavour of the content of the BOBCATSSS Symposium, held in Zadar, Croatia, in January 2008.

A brief and subjective account of approaches to the main topics of this conference is the approach taken in the article.

The theme of the symposium, “Access to information for everyone” invited a variety of approaches that show the complexity regarding the future library institution and the future roles of the librarian. The conference included areas such as technological developments, e.g. Web 2.0 and e‐inclusion, digital rights management, open access, and the library as physical space.

A brief report of value to library and information professionals regarding provision of access to information and the future of libraries and librarians.

The study aims to profile the scientific retractions in the top five global universities and provide descriptive statistics on specific subjects.

The data for reasons behind retractions is manually extracted from the Retraction Watch Database. The top five global universities according to the Times Higher Education global ranking of 2024 are selected for this study.

The study found that Stanford University emerged with the highest number of retractions in the assessment across institutions in the field of basic life sciences and health sciences. Notably, the predominant reasons for these retractions were identified, with “unreliable results” being the most prevalent, accounting for 53 retractions. Following closely was the category of “errors in results and/or conclusions”, contributing to 51 retractions. MIT has the longest time between publication and retraction of any subject group, with an average of 1,701 days.

This study has some limitations, as it only analysed the retractions of the top five global universities.

The study provides a comprehensive analysis of retractions in academic publishing, focusing on reasons, time gaps, article types and accessibility categories across prestigious universities. The paper underscores the critical role of retractions in maintaining the integrity of scientific literature, emphasizing the importance of transparent correction and responsible peer review to ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of published research. Results show that common reasons for retractions include duplication, fake peer review and plagiarism, underlining the need for ethical research standards.

By distorting the peer review process, predatory journals lure researchers and collect article processing charges (APCs) to earn income, thereby threatening clinical decisions. This study aims to identifying the characteristics of predatory publishing in the dermatology literature.

The authors used Kscien's list to detect dermatology-related predatory journals. Bibliometric parameters were analyzed at the level of journals, publishers, documents and authors.

Sixty-one potential predatory dermatology publishers published 4,164 articles in 57 journals from 2000 to 2020, with most publishers claiming to be located in the United States. Most journals were 1–5 years old. Six journals were indexed in PubMed, two in Scopus and 43 in Google Scholar (GS). The average APC was 1,049 USD. Skin, patient, cutaneous, psoriasis, dermatitis and acne were the most frequently used keywords in the article's title. A total of 1,146 articles in GS received 4,725 citations. More than half of the journals had <10 citations. Also, 318 articles in Web of Science were contaminated by the most cited articles and 4.49% of the articles had reported their funding source. The average number of authors per article was 3.7. India, the United States and Japan had the most articles from 119 involved countries. Asia, Europe and North America had the most contributed authors; 5.2% of articles were written through international collaboration. A majority of authors were from high- and low-middle-income countries. Women contributed 43.57% and 39.66% as the first and corresponding authors, respectively.

The study had limitations, including heavy reliance on Kscien's list, potential for human error in manual data extraction and nonseparation of types of articles. Journals that only published dermatology articles were reviewed, so those occasionally publishing dermatology articles were missed. Predatory journals covering multiple subjects (Petrisor, 2016) may have resulted in overlooking some dermatology papers. This study did not claim to have covered all articles in predatory dermatology journals (PDJs) but evaluated many of them. The authors accept the claim that Kscien's list may have made a mistake in including journals.

The wide dispersion of authors involved in PDJs highlights the need to increase awareness among these authors.