Jukka-Pekka Suomela 2014 Ethics and quality in research and publishing

Conducting studies (ethical consideration) Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity, Responsible conduct of research and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland, 2012 (applied from )

University of Turku, Ethics Committee, committee.aspx committee.aspx non-medical research The Hospital District of Southwest Finland, Ethics Committee, toimikunta/Sivut/default.aspx toimikunta/Sivut/default.aspx medical research (incl. clinical nutrition studies) Conducting studies (ethical consideration)

World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration National Committee on Medical Research Ethics, Conducting studies (ethical consideration)

Research misconducts Research misconducts include plagiarism, fabrication and falsification Plagiarism is a growing problem in English-language journals, especially among non-native English speaking scientists, also growing problem among graduate students Example: Plagiarism (fairUTU): o/ohjauksen-ja-koulutuksen- tukipalvelut/ok/fairutu/Sivut/Guidelines-for-Misconduct-and- Fraud-at-the-UTU-.aspx o/ohjauksen-ja-koulutuksen- tukipalvelut/ok/fairutu/Sivut/Guidelines-for-Misconduct-and- Fraud-at-the-UTU-.aspx

Publishing bias the tendency of researchers, editors, and companies to handle the reporting of experimental results that are positive (i.e. showing a significant finding) differently from results that are negative (i.e. supporting the null hypothesis) or inconclusive, leading to a misleading bias in the overall published literature A problem!

Publishing practice (ethical consideration) Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines publicationethics.org/international-standards-editors-and- authors publicationethics.org/international-standards-editors-and- authors

Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals CONSORT 2010 Statement Publishing practice (ethical consideration)

Each journal has its own guidelines For example British Journal of Nutrition, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, ejcn.nature.com/cgi- bin/main.plex?form_type=display_auth_instructionshttp://mts- ejcn.nature.com/cgi- bin/main.plex?form_type=display_auth_instructions Publishing practice (ethical consideration)

Quality of scientific articles Commonly evaluated by measuring the amount of citations it has received (citation index). Also the objectivity of the text and the references used are important Citations also used for evaluating journals, individual researchers, research groups, research institutes and universities, subject areas and countries.

Quality of scientific articles Citation index First citation database in 1960: Science Citation Index (SCI) by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)Science Citation Index In more specifics, the number of citations indicate the response of the scientific community Correlate quite well with the results from peer-reviews – considered an appropriate indicator of quality Databases with citation information Web of Science (WoS) (Thomson Reuters, former SCI by ISI) Scopus (Elsevier) Google Scholar (also non-scientific)

Quality of scientific articles New: Altmetrics e.g. visibility and impact of the article in web and social media - fast

Quality of a journal Evaluated by qualitative and quantitative methods Expert surveys, publication forum, peer reviews (subjective assessment methods) Circulation and usage statistics, acceptance and rejection rates, indexing services covering the journal Journal impact factor (IF) Do not tell about a specific article or the level of research produced by a specific researcher

Quality of a journal The characteristics of a quality journal are: high standards for acceptance of manuscripts A broadly representative editorial board a critical refereeing system promptness of publication coverage by major abstracting and indexing services high confidence level of scientists in the contents high frequency of citation by other journals

Quality of a journal Journal impact factor Is the number of citations received in that year/papers published in that journal during the two preceding years the oldest and an extensively used index for measuring the quality of a journal Based on an assumption that those articles that are often cited contain significant knowledge for their discipline Found in Journal Citation Reports (JCR,Thomson Reuters)Journal Citation Reports Includes the journals in WoS Only the high quality journals are included (according to Thomson Reuter Criteria) Journal list can be sorted according to the impact factor, cited half life, article influence etc 2007 onwards JCR also publishes Five year Impact Factors for journals

Quality of a journal Weaknesses of Journal impact factor Quality of journal with the citation not considered Citation practices differ between the research fields, direct comparison only within discipline Focused on English language journals Inclusion of self-citations Review articles get more citations Misused to draw conclusions about the performance of an individual researcher or a research group

Quality of a journal New factors for measuring the impact Take into account the quality of the journal citing the article Based on the PageRank algorithm Analyze the articles and the network that the citations form, and in this way analyze the relative value of the citation More complicated than journal IF Under development, significance to be seen Eigenfactor, Article influence, H index, SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

Quality of a journal H index (Hirsch index) Can be calculated from publication list when the number of citations is available for the articles. Available in international citation databases (WoS, Scopus). productivity of a journal over a long time period journals that publish review articles are not over-valued (compare to journal IF) not calculated for one specific fixed time period like the IF: also comparison of journals that differ from each other in terms of how fast the journals start getting citations

Quality of a journal H index (Hirsch index) Publish or Perish (A citation analysis software program) calculates the H- index of journals using citation data from Google Scholar Publish or Perish Also evaluation of the journals not found in Thomson Reuters' WoS database (without IF score) fairer evaluation to journals that are cited mainly in sources outside the WoS, like in books or in journals that are not included in the WoS.

Subject guides, Oulu University library, Altmetrics – article level metrics, services/evaluating-publication- activities/bibliometrics/altmetrics/index.htm References