Nature 18 January 2023 An international team of researchers (Germany, UK) have uncovered hundreds of online advertisements that offer the chance to buy authorship on research papers to be published in reputable journals. Publishers and journals are investigating the claims and have retracted dozens of articles over suspicions that people have paid to be named as authors, despite not participating in the research. In July 2022, the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning retracted 30 papers linked to adverts on International Publisher. In May 2022, Springer Nature retracted a paper for the first time over suspicions that some of […]
Tag Archives: Bibliometrics
ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers in study
Nanowerk January 16, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (Northwestern University, University of Chicago) took titles from recent papers from high-impact journals and asked ChatGPT to generate abstracts. They ran these generated abstracts and the original abstracts through a plagiarism detector and AI output detector, and had blinded human reviewers try to differentiate between generated and original abstracts. Each reviewer was given 25 abstracts that were a mixture of the generated and original abstracts and asked them to give a binary score of what they thought the abstract was. They could only spot ChatGPT generated abstracts 68% of […]
Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study
Phys.org January 4, 2023 Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. A team of researchers in the US (University of Minnesota, University of Arizona) analysed the claims of new scientific and technological knowledge at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. They […]
Study examines how many scientists a region needs to achieve dominance in a field
Phys.org December 29, 2022 The conditions for the emergence of a leading regional scientific environment are poorly understood. The existence of a critical mass of scientists is often assumed. An international team of researchers (Austria, the Netherlands, South Africa, USA – Santa Fe Institute) used a unique dataset of global scientific activity and researcher mobility over several decades to show empirical evidence in three scientific areas (semiconductor research, embryonic stem cells, and Internet research) that the process of scientific knowledge accumulation was remarkably general and applied to practically all regions. Scale-free growth patterns suggested that regions that move early into […]
Online platform designed to improve reproducibility, scientific collaborations
Phys.org June 24, 2022 Reproducibility is a significant challenge in (epi)genomic research due to the complexity of experiments composed of traditional biochemistry and informatics. Recent advances have exacerbated this as high-throughput sequencing data is generated at an unprecedented pace. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University) has developed a Platform for Epi-Genomic Research (PEGR), a web-based project management platform that tracks and quality controls experiments from conception to publication-ready figures, compatible with multiple assays and bioinformatic pipelines. It supports rigor and reproducibility for biochemists working at the bench, while fully supporting reproducibility and reliability for […]
Flawed research not retracted fast enough to prevent spread of misinformation, study finds
Phys.org June 15, 2022 The spread of potentially inaccurate or misleading results from retracted papers can harm the scientific community and the public. A team of researchers in the US (University of Michigan, Northwestern University) has quantified the amount and type of attention 3,851 retracted papers received over time in different online platforms. Comparing with a set of nonretracted control papers from the same journals with similar publication year, number of coauthors, and author impact, they showed that retracted papers receive more attention after publication not only on social media but also, on heavily curated platforms, such as news outlets […]
Leading journal Nature will make sex and gender reporting mandatory in research
Phys.org May 27, 2022 According to Nature journals’ new policy, starting in June, researchers who submit papers to a subset of the Nature Portfolio journals https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/ethics-and-biosecurity will need to describe whether, and how, sex and gender are considered in study design. If no sex and gender analyses were carried out, authors will need to clarify why. This will apply to work with human participants, as well as other vertebrate animals and cell experimental studies. “Sex” and “gender” are terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Sex refers to biological attributes, including genetics and reproductive […]
Researchers find citation bias in published papers and evidence that the problem is getting worse
Phys.org June 1, 2022 Citations and text analysis are both used to study the distribution and flow of ideas between researchers, fields, and countries, but the resulting flows are rarely equal. A team of researchers in the US (City University of New York, UCLA, Stanford University) argues that the differences in these two flows capture a growing global inequality in the production of scientific knowledge. They offered a framework called ‘citational lensing’ to identify where citations should appear between countries but are absent given that what is embedded in their published abstract texts is highly similar. This framework also identifies […]
In science, small groups create big ideas
Phys.org January 21, 2022 An international team of researchers (Taiwan, Japan) explains the researcher dynamics of generating and developing Emerging Research Topics (ETs) in life sciences and medicine over the past half-century by analyzing the pre-, contemporary-, and post-participation of researchers publishing articles containing the emerging keywords that are elements of ETs. Their results suggest that, while manpower needs for publication have increased, less manpower is required to generate ETs. These trends illustrate a mode shift in the scientific practice of researchers that have generated and developed ETs over the last 50 years as well as highlight the significance of […]
Scientists use public databases to leap over scourge of publication bias
Eurekalert June 9, 2021 Due to publication bias, there has been little focus on genes other than well-known signature hypoxia-inducible genes. Therefore, researchers in Japan performed a meta-analysis to identify novel hypoxia-inducible genes. They searched publicly available transcriptome databases to obtain hypoxia-related experimental data, retrieved the metadata, and manually curated it, selected the genes that are differentially expressed by hypoxic stimulation, and evaluated their relevance in hypoxia by performing enrichment analyses. They calculated and evaluated the number of reports and similarity coefficients of each gene to HIF1A, which is a representative gene in hypoxia studies. In this data-driven study, they […]