Frontiers in research metrics and analytics最新文献

Patents are essential for transferring scientific discoveries to meaningful products that benefit societies. While the academic community focuses on the number of citations to rank scholarly works according to their "scientific merit," the number of citations is unrelated to the relevance for patentable innovation. To explore associations between patents and scholarly works in publicly available patent data, we propose to utilize statistical methods that are commonly used in biology to determine gene-disease associations. We illustrate their usage on patents related to biotechnological trends of high relevance for food safety and ecology, namely the CRISPR-based gene editing technology (>60,000 patents) and cyanobacterial biotechnology (>33,000 patents). Innovation trends are found through their unexpected large changes of patent numbers in a time-series analysis. From the total set of scholarly works referenced by all investigated patents (~254,000 publications), we identified ~1,000 scholarly works that are statistical significantly over-represented in the references of patents from changing innovation trends that concern immunology, agricultural plant genomics, and biotechnological engineering methods. The detected associations are consistent with the technical requirements of the respective innovations. In summary, the presented data-driven analysis workflow can identify scholarly works that were required for changes in innovation trends, and, therefore, is of interest for researches that would like to evaluate the relevance of publications beyond the number of citations.

Researcher fraud is often easy and enticing in academic research, with little risk of detection. Cases of extensive fraud continue to occur. The amount of fraud that goes undetected is unknown and may be substantial. Three strategies for addressing researcher fraud are (a) retrospective investigations after allegations of fraud have been made, (b) sting operations that provide conclusive evidence of fraud as it occurs, and (c) data management practices that prevent the occurrence of fraud. Institutional and regulatory efforts to address researcher fraud have focused almost exclusively on the retrospective strategy. The retrospective approach is subject to controversy due to the limitations of post-hoc evidence in science, the difficulty in establishing who actually committed the fraud in some cases, the application of a legal standard of evidence that is much lower than the usual standards of evidence in science, and the lack of legal expertise by scientists investigating fraud. The retrospective strategy may be reliably effective primarily in cases of extensive, careless fraud. Sting operations can overcome these limitations and controversies, but are not feasible in many situations. Data management practices that are effective at preventing researcher fraud and unintentional errors are well-established in clinical trials regulated by government agencies, but appear to be largely unknown or unimplemented in most academic research. Established data management practices include: archiving secure copies of the raw data, audit trails, restricted access to the data and data collection processes, software validation, quality control checks, blinding, preregistration of data processing and analysis programs, and research audits that directly address fraud. Current discussions about data management in academic research focus on sharing data with little attention to practices that prevent intentional and unintentional errors. A designation or badge such as error-controlled data management could be established to indicate research that was conducted with data management practices that effectively address intentional and unintentional errors.

This perspective paper contemplates the nuances of engaging with literature ethically in conducting a scoping review based on the researchers' project on girlhood studies in Indonesia. We assert that the ethical perspective extends beyond conventional primary data collection from human participants, further emphasizing the essence of a feminist methodology in this scholarly investigation. We discuss the interplay between the role of rigor and the dynamics of power relations in research, shedding light on reconciling between the pursuit of facts and acknowledgment of biases in knowledge production. This reflection offers insights into the methodological process and the researcher's role, contributing to the broader discourse on how research can effectively address issues of gender equity and social inclusion. Through this paper, we underscore the necessity of an intentional approach in unifying the domains of science and advocacy because only then can we truly catalyze transformative change. In doing so, we seek to foster a more comprehensive, objective, and empathetic understanding of the researched: in this case, the experiences of girls and young women -and, by extension, marginalized individuals in Indonesia and beyond.