Group invents character as form of protest, but ethicists say campaign is misguided

Academic journals provide a key quality-control mechanism in science. Yet, information asymmetries and conflicts of interests incentivize scientists to deceive journals about the quality of their research. How can honesty be ensured, despite incentives for deception? Here, we address this question by applying the theory of honest signaling to the publication process. Our models demonstrate that several mechanisms can ensure honest journal submission, including differential benefits, differential costs, and costs to resubmitting rejected papers. Without submission costs, scientists benefit from submitting all papers to high-ranking journals, unless papers can only be submitted a limited number of times. Counterintuitively, our analysis implies that inefficiencies in academic publishing (e.g., arbitrary formatting requirements, long review times) can serve a function by disincentivizing scientists from submitting low-quality work to high-ranking journals. Our models provide simple, powerful tools for understanding how to promote honest paper submission in academic publishing.

Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His new book, Science…

For Elizabeth Gadd, the Covid-19 pandemic makes it clear that long standing issues with academic publications need to be addressed quickly and definitively.

Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT). We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication. Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT. Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors. These results suggest disconnects between what academics value versus what they think their peers value, and between the importance of journal prestige and metrics for tenured versus untenured faculty in publishing and RPT perceptions.

An introduction to scholarly communication for sociology, intended to help sociologists in their careers, while advancing an inclusive, open, equitable, and sustainable scholarly knowledge ecosystem.

Open Access mega-journals have in some academic disciplines become a key channel for communicating research. In others, however, they remain unknown. Drawing on evidence from a series of focus gro…

Originally, this editorial was intended as a discussion of authorship norms across disciplines—a seemingly harmless topic relevant to academic libraries given libraries provide guidance and access to knowledge in all disciplines and can serve as the linchpin in multi-, inter- or transdisciplinary research. Our explorations, though, led us in a different direction, one that has implications for this journal.  Research and scholarship have experienced profound changes across all disciplines. One of the more transformational shifts has been the movement toward more interdisciplinary research and collaborations across subjects and sectors. This necessitates the awareness of and ability to navigate different disciplinary norms and expectations. The scholarly practices of academic communities often have unique values and norms, including the structure and system of rewards; the nature of collaborative, interdependent, and solitary research practices; and the models and norms of authorship and acknowledgment.

Scientometrics - The surge in the number of authors per article in the biomedical field makes it difficult to quantify the contribution of individual authors. Conventional citation metrics are...

We all know that writing and publishing is of great concern to those whose work is in academia; the "publish or perish" burden haunts pre-te...

Article: Approaches to creating ‘humane’ research evaluation metrics for the humanities

Many Chinese doctorate students can’t graduate until they publish articles in academic journals — a demand that pushes many into corruption.

Bad science journals – nothing new here Science journalism in Germany in the last days was awash with a report on “predatory publishers” and an integrity ‘crisis’ for German science.

Driven by student government advocacy, one university’s change to its promotion and tenure guide highlights an important way institutions can incentiv

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices…