Malgorzata Lagisz, Joanna Rutkowska, Upama Aich, Robert M Ross, Manuela S Santana, Joshua Wang, Nina Trubanová, Matthew J Page, Andrew Adrian Yu Pua, Yefeng Yang, Bawan Amin, April Robin Martinig, Adrian Barnett, Aswathi Surendran, Ju Zhang, David N Borg, Jafsia Elisee, James G Wrightson, Shinichi Nakagawa
{"title":"\"Best Paper\" awards lack transparency, inclusivity, and support for Open Science.","authors":"Malgorzata Lagisz, Joanna Rutkowska, Upama Aich, Robert M Ross, Manuela S Santana, Joshua Wang, Nina Trubanová, Matthew J Page, Andrew Adrian Yu Pua, Yefeng Yang, Bawan Amin, April Robin Martinig, Adrian Barnett, Aswathi Surendran, Ju Zhang, David N Borg, Jafsia Elisee, James G Wrightson, Shinichi Nakagawa","doi":"10.1371/journal.pbio.3002715","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Awards can propel academic careers. They also reflect the culture and values of the scientific community. But do awards incentivize greater transparency, inclusivity, and openness in science? Our cross-disciplinary survey of 222 awards for the \"best\" journal articles across all 27 SCImago subject areas revealed that journals and learned societies administering such awards generally publish little detail on their procedures and criteria. Award descriptions were brief, rarely including contact details or information on the nominations pool. Nominations of underrepresented groups were not explicitly encouraged, and concepts that align with Open Science were almost absent from the assessment criteria. At the same time, 10% of awards, especially the recently established ones, tended to use article-level impact metrics. USA-affiliated researchers dominated the winner's pool (48%), while researchers from the Global South were uncommon (11%). Sixty-one percent of individual winners were men. Overall, Best Paper awards miss the global calls for greater transparency and equitable access to academic recognition. We provide concrete and implementable recommendations for scientific awards to improve the scientific recognition system and incentives for better scientific practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":49001,"journal":{"name":"PLoS Biology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11265724/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PLoS Biology","FirstCategoryId":"99","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002715","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/7/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Agricultural and Biological Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Awards can propel academic careers. They also reflect the culture and values of the scientific community. But do awards incentivize greater transparency, inclusivity, and openness in science? Our cross-disciplinary survey of 222 awards for the "best" journal articles across all 27 SCImago subject areas revealed that journals and learned societies administering such awards generally publish little detail on their procedures and criteria. Award descriptions were brief, rarely including contact details or information on the nominations pool. Nominations of underrepresented groups were not explicitly encouraged, and concepts that align with Open Science were almost absent from the assessment criteria. At the same time, 10% of awards, especially the recently established ones, tended to use article-level impact metrics. USA-affiliated researchers dominated the winner's pool (48%), while researchers from the Global South were uncommon (11%). Sixty-one percent of individual winners were men. Overall, Best Paper awards miss the global calls for greater transparency and equitable access to academic recognition. We provide concrete and implementable recommendations for scientific awards to improve the scientific recognition system and incentives for better scientific practice.
期刊介绍:
PLOS Biology is the flagship journal of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and focuses on publishing groundbreaking and relevant research in all areas of biological science. The journal features works at various scales, ranging from molecules to ecosystems, and also encourages interdisciplinary studies. PLOS Biology publishes articles that demonstrate exceptional significance, originality, and relevance, with a high standard of scientific rigor in methodology, reporting, and conclusions.
The journal aims to advance science and serve the research community by transforming research communication to align with the research process. It offers evolving article types and policies that empower authors to share the complete story behind their scientific findings with a diverse global audience of researchers, educators, policymakers, patient advocacy groups, and the general public.
PLOS Biology, along with other PLOS journals, is widely indexed by major services such as Crossref, Dimensions, DOAJ, Google Scholar, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, and Web of Science. Additionally, PLOS Biology is indexed by various other services including AGRICOLA, Biological Abstracts, BIOSYS Previews, CABI CAB Abstracts, CABI Global Health, CAPES, CAS, CNKI, Embase, Journal Guide, MEDLINE, and Zoological Record, ensuring that the research content is easily accessible and discoverable by a wide range of audiences.