This month three of the five most popular papers are original articles and two essays. Two papers are from our most recent issue from August, and the others are from earlier years. Always great to see our readers finding interesting papers from our archives.
By coincidence, we have two papers that analyse datasets spanning ten years between 208-2017, one on the uses of ResearchGate, and the second on gender, age and academic productivity in the social sciences in Vietnam.
We also have a review of journal guidelines for title, abstracts and keywords; an article addressing misconduct in biomedical images, and publishing challenges faced by authors with English as a second language.
European Science Editing (ESE) is our official, quarterly, peer reviewed journal. Issues are made freely available 6 months after print publication. ESE publishes articles covering all aspects of scientific editing and publishing. It includes research articles, meeting reports, essays and viewpoints, book and website reviews, as well as highlighting events, resources and publications of interest to members
Ten years of research on ResearchGate: a scoping review using Google Scholar (2008–2017) Issue: 45(3) August 2019. Original articles
Juan José Prieto-Gutiérrez
http://europeanscienceediting.eu/articles/ten-years-of-research-on-researchgate-a-scoping-review-using-google-scholar-2008-2017/
Objective: To analyse quantitatively the articles published during 2008–2017 about the academic social networking site ResearchGate.
Methods: A scoping bibliometric review of documents retrieved using Google Scholar was conducted, limited to publications that contained the word ‘ResearchGate’ in their title and were published from 2008 to 2017.
Results: The search yielded 159 documents, once a preliminary list of 386 documents retrieved from Google Scholar was filtered, which eliminated about 60% of the results that were bibliographic citations and not documents. Papers in journals were the most numerous type of documents (n = 73; 46%), followed by conference papers (n = 31; 19.5%). Contributing eight publications, two Spanish scholars (Delgado López-Cózar and OrduñaMalea, who were co-authors in each case) were the most prolific authors writing on this topic during the ten-year period. The keywords most used in the documents were ‘ResearchGate’ and ‘Altmetrics’. The publications were cited frequently since 2014 (more than 90% of the total cites fell in that period), and those with more than one author were the most cited ones. The authors of the documents were mainly librarians and information science professionals, who wrote primarily as co-authors with colleagues from their own institutions, mostly published in English.
Conclusions: Interest in ResearchGate has grown since 2015, as evident from the number of articles published and the citations they received.
Journals’ guidelines about title, abstract and keywords: an overview of Information Science and Communication Science areas Issue: 44(4) November 2018. Original articles
Mariângela Spotti Lopes Fujita, María-del-Carmen Agustín-Lacruz, and Ana Lúcia Terra
http://europeanscienceediting.eu/articles/journals-guidelines-about-title-abstract-and-keywords-an-overview-of-information-science-and-communication-science-areas/
Objective: The purpose of this exploratory study was to observe and analyse guidelines for authors on writing their papers’ title, abstract and keywords.
Methods: The sample consisted of 64 journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR): 32 (50%) Library & Information Science (LIS) journals and 32 (50%) Communication Science (CS) journals. A spreadsheet was used for data collection, containing 36 items grouped into four categories: identification data, guidelines for the title, the abstract, and the keywords of the scientific article. Then, in each category, the LIS journals were compared with CS journals, to verify how specific aspects of knowledge organisation and representation are reflected in editorial policies.
Results: Majority of CS journals (27, 84%) and less than a quarter of LIS journals (7, 22%) referred to a style guide on their website. Specific guidelines for the title were presented in 17 (53%) LIS journals and in 23 (72%) of CS journals, mainly concerning the word number. Twenty three (72%) LIS journals and 31 (97%) CS journals included guidelines for writing abstracts, focusing on word number and the structure of abstracts. Instructions for keywords were presented in 21 (66%) LIS journals and 28 (88%) CS journals, defining the number of keywords and the use of controlled vocabulary.
Conclusion: There is a tendency to standardise general indications and criteria about titles, abstracts and keywords. Guidelines on writing abstracts, titles and keywords have smaller presence in editorial policies of LIS journals, than of CS journals.
Gender, age, research experience, leading role and academic productivity of Vietnamese researchers in the social sciences and humanities: exploring a 2008-2017 Scopus dataset Issue: 43(3) August 2017. Original articles
Quan-Hoang Vuong et al.
http://europeanscienceediting.eu/articles/gender-age-research-experience-leading-role-and-academic-productivity-of-vietnamese-researchers-in-the-social-sciences-and-humanities-exploring-a-2008-2017-scopus-dataset/
Background: Academic productivity has been studied by scholars all round the world for many years. However, in Vietnam, this topic has scarcely been addressed. This research therefore aims at better understanding the correlations between gender, age, research experience, the leading role of corresponding authors, and the total number of their publications in the specific realm of social sciences and humanities.
Methods: The study employed a Scopus dataset with publication profiles of 410 Vietnamese researchers between 2008 and 2017.
Results: Men did not differ from women in academic publications (P=0.827). The proficiency of corresponding authors positively correlated with the number of published papers (rs=0.61, P0.001). Lastly, the age of lead authors strongly correlated with scientific output (rs=0.74, P0.001 for authors between 40 and 50 years of age).
Conclusion: While scientific output correlated with the author ages and number of articles in which they led, it was not correlated with their gender in Vietnamese social science and humanities authors
Misconduct of images: guidance for biomedical authors and editorsIssue: 45(3) August 2019. Essays
Qing Ye and Hanfeng Lin
http://europeanscienceediting.eu/articles/misconduct-of-images-guidance-for-biomedical-authors-and-editors/
Misconduct in terms of manipulation of images has become an increasingly serious issue for the scientific community, especially in biomedicine. Such misconduct takes many forms, the major categories being falsified or fabricated images, manipulated images, and plagiarized images. Different tools and techniques are briefly described to help authors and editors in detecting such misconduct, and guidance is offered on appropriate use of images under different situations. More specifically, Crossref Similarity Check, Motuin, and Droplets are proposed as the tools of choice for detecting similarity between images and their possible manipulation.
Publishing challenges faced by authors with English as a second language Issue: 42(2) May 2016. Essays
Trevor Lane and Julian Tang
http://europeanscienceediting.eu/articles/publishing-challenges-faced-by-authors-with-english-as-a-second-language/
Edanz Group Ltd, an English editing and publication support company established in 1995, provides professional academic English services to authors for whom English is a second language. Feedback from these authors has consistently shown that they value not only language editing, but also advice on how to overcome practical barriers to publishing research in international peer-reviewed journals. In this article, we outline some of these barriers and argue that editing service providers play an increasingly important role in levelling the playing field for authors for whom English is a second language.
Comments