Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance最新文献

Regulations on reporting research misconduct have undergone a remarkable process of development since the 1980s. At the same time, many states have also developed legislation governing the receiving of alerts and for protecting whistleblowers against reprisal. Although these two bodies of legislation share the aim of organizing the practice of reporting, they have been developed in isolation from each other, and without sufficient thought as to how they should be linked. Based on an analysis of European Union law and its transposition in France, this article identifies the convergences and divergences between whistleblowing legislation and the reporting of research misconduct. It then looks at the contributions that each body of law can make to the other, both in terms of the procedures applicable and the protection afforded to whistleblowers. The lessons learned from the comparison of whistleblowing law and the procedures for reporting scientific misconduct allow for the identification of avenues for improvement.

Background: Since the advent of online research metrics, which began with Web of Science in 1997, these metrics have been increasingly used to rank researchers and universities. Over the last two decades, the easy access to research metrics has greatly benefitted the academic community and beyond by providing quantitative measures for ranking researchers, universities and departments. However, this accessibility, accompanied by a tendency to quantitatively evaluate research quality and impact, has also shifted the focus toward practices aimed at enhancing research metrics rather than pursuing high-quality, potentially path-breaking research. This trend threatens to degrade global research advancement and invalidate rankings.

Methodology: We perform an analysis of statistics from the Stanford's top 2% list and Nobel Laureates.

Results: We demonstrate that an accelerating number of researchers - on the order of 10% or 20,000 researchers on Stanford's Top 2% researchers - are achieving implausibly high-publication and new coauthor rates, with many producing tens to hundreds of papers per year, and gaining hundreds to thousands of new coauthors annually.

Conclusions: We propose a method to renormalize research metrics. Our renormalized metrics aim to remove the incentive for researchers to prioritize quantity or resort to unethical practices to boost their metrics.

Background: Polarized research has become a problem for the trustworthiness and applicability of scientific results. Accordingly, this paper addresses three key questions: 1) What is polarization in scientific research? 2) Why is such polarization problematic? 3) How can the problem be addressed?Methods: The first question is addressed by describing how the polarization has been characterized in the literature and by analysing an example before assessing existing definitions and elaborating a definition of polarization. The second question is answered by describing challenges with polarization found in the literature. The third question is addressed by investigating different explanations for and relevant mechanisms behind polarization in research, such as psychological, structural, epistemic and ontological, evaluative, and social-constructionist explanations. Moreover, several approaches from the philosophy of science are investigated.Results: Polarization in research is characterized by opposing and incommensurable positions that tend to stem from differences in basic values, and that are used to define, differentiate, bolster, and demarcate between groups and for reinforcing their identity. The problem with polarization is that it violates a broad range of basic norms in science, and hampers scientific progress, represents large opportunity costs, undermines trust in science and, subsequently that it undercuts the application of scientific results as well as future funding. There are many potential measures to reduce polarization. However, there are no simple solutions, as polarization is a complex phenomenon deeply rooted in basic human characteristics.Conclusion: Polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon and a basic challenge for scientific research. It is crucial to increase the awareness of polarization, and a clear definition is key to study and address the problem. However, while there are many ways to actively address the problem of polarization in scientific research, there are no easy solutions. More research is needed to move from what we can do to what we should do.

Background: We consider a research model for manuscript evaluation using a two-stage process. In the first stage, the current submission reminds reviewers of previous reviewing experiences, and then, reviewers aggregate these past review experiences into a kind of norm for assessing the scientific contribution and clarity of writing required for a manuscript. In the second stage, the reviewer's norms are imposed on the manuscript under review, and the reviewer's attention is drawn to discrepancies between the norm retrieved from previous similar peer review experiences and the reality for this submission.Methods: Five research hypotheses were integrated into this research model. In our study, we tested these five research hypotheses for statistical differences among reviewers by gender, experience, and academic rank using an online survey. There were 573 respondents.Results: We did not find significant differences among reviewers in their basic behavioral patterns. The only exception was that the low-rank reviewers agreed with the first hypothesis "H1: Selective norm" to a greater extent than the high-rank reviewers.Conclusions: The interaction between a reviewer's past review experiences and the actual scientific contribution and writing clarity of the manuscript under review can explain the lack of consistency among different reviews for the same manuscript.

Background: Universities are increasingly offering training in research integrity (RI) to enhance research quality and foster RI. Despite the importance of integrating scientific virtues into such training, there is a lack of assessment of virtue ethics-based RI training.

Methods: This was a randomised controlled study assessing the impact of a virtue-based training for RI, performed at the University of Split School of Medicine in 2020-2021. We included first-year medical students who were randomly assigned to a control group, receiving a RI lecture, or the interventional group, receiving the same lecture plus a virtue-based training for RI. We measured changes in Ethical Climate Questionnaire (ECQ) scores as the primary outcome and the difference between perceived and desired ECQ scores as the secondary outcome.

Results: Of 181 participants, 105 (55 control, 50 experimental) completed the study. The virtue-based training did not significantly change ethical climate perceptions between groups. Dominant climates were Company rules and procedures and Laws and professional codes. Overall, the preferred climates emphasized Team interest and Social responsibility.

Conclusions: This study demonstrates the value of using ECQ to assess RI training and highlights the need for further research into the long-term effects of virtue-based training.

Retraction, as a post-publication quality control measure increasingly adopted by mainstream journals, has been observed in a few potential predatory journals (PPJs), but the extent and handling of retractions by PPJs in general remain unclear. This study investigated retraction practices among the 1,511 standalone PPJs on the updated Beall's List. Data from the Retraction Watch Database revealed that only 46 of the PPJs, including 18 indexed by the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, had retracted a total of 645 publications as of 2022. The retraction handling performance of these PPJs was evaluated in terms of publicity of retraction policies, availability of retraction documents, visibility of retractions, and informativeness of retraction notices. Overall, the retracting PPJs performed poorly against these criteria and showed a trend of inadequate documentation of retraction policies and documents over time. A positive correlation was found between WoS inclusion and retraction handling performance of the PPJs except for the publicity of retraction policies. These findings suggest that retraction handling performance could serve as an additional important criterion of journal editorial practices and highlight the desirability of evaluating journal legitimacy in terms of post-publication quality control through retraction.