In an article in Instances Greater Schooling Professor Harvey J. Graff described malpractice amongst educational journal editors and known as for a invoice of rights to guard authors in opposition to such excesses. He mentioned arbitrary decision-making, failure to speak the explanations for choices, negligence, manuscripts with extreme time in evaluate, unprofessional evaluations and use of inappropriate reviewers. I agree with all of his observations. I’ve been an editor (and largely an Editor-in-Chief) of main worldwide journals for nearly 38 years. Throughout that point I’ve encountered all kinds of behaviour, good and dangerous, by authors, reviewers and editors. I’ve made my errors, however I’ve all the time tried to do the job correctly completed, and never in an arbitrary or unfair method.
Readers who need a abstract of editorial malpractice can learn Professor Graff’s article (Graff 2022). Herein I’m going to focus on malpractice by authors. Because the variety of individuals desirous to publish in educational journals continues to rise, malpractice proliferates, in some circumstances to epidemic proportions. These are the varieties it takes:-
- irrelevant submission (out of scope)
- plagiarism
- use of copyrighted materials with out the specific permission of the copyright holder and writer of the mental property
- duplicate submission
- false authorship
- improper use of individuals’s names
- so-called “honorary” authorship
- papers written by surrogate authors or synthetic intelligence
- falsification of knowledge and outcomes (primarily within the medical subject)
- quotation cartels
- different moral violations (together with political points).
Irrelevant submission. This isn’t strictly malpractice. It often represents a failure to contemplate what the journal can be keen to publish. Sadly its title shouldn’t be an entire and correct information to the kind of papers it consists of. By advantage of their choices about what to incorporate within the periodical, and what to exclude from it, all managing editors and editors-in-chief need to outline a profile for a journal. That is the one strategy to give it an id and make sure that it isn’t overwhelmed by semi-relevant or irrelevant submissions. Journals do have broadly various insurance policies about what they’ll embody and the way broad they’ll permit their scope to be. Nevertheless, there’s an rising downside with submissions which are merely out of scope and may by no means have been submitted within the first place. Coping with these manuscripts wastes everybody’s time. In a high-volume journal most likely greater than 1 / 4 of all submissions will fall into this class, and every manuscript must be individually rejected. A little bit extra care in selecting a journal to submit one’s work to would roughly clear up this downside.
Plagiarism. There’s a quickly rising downside with the misuse of different works, whether or not they be by the authors of a manuscript or by different writers. Editors and reviewers ought to demand that works are authentic of their prose, illustrations and information. This implies important divergence from what has gone earlier than, not merely camouflaging another person’s concepts with slight adjustments in wording. Sadly, we reside in an age in which there’s an rising tendency to put in writing by copy-and-paste, lifting sentences and infrequently total paragraphs out of present revealed works and plonking them immediately into new manuscripts. A similarity rating of 20% or extra raises a pink flag. There are, after all, exceptions wherein the reuse of fabric is completely justified. Reusing materials from pre-prints and dealing papers are often acceptable, as they aren’t full, formal publications. Correct attribution of sources may help as effectively. Nevertheless, plagiarism is on the rise and, regardless of the existence of highly effective software program to detect it, we merely have no idea how a lot of it goes undetected. For instance, direct translation of copyrighted materials from one language to a different is not going to be detected by the software program.
Copyrighted materials. The place sources are correctly attributed, there’s a widespread tendency to disregard the procedures of copyright launch, wherein permission to breed revealed materials is obtained. Though there’s a gray space concerning the quantity or dimension of fabric for which permission have to be obtained, there’s nonetheless a transparent obligation to not use, for instance, a map revealed in one other work, with out permission.
Duplicate submission. It’s customary apply in educational publishing to require authors to certify that their submitted manuscripts usually are not presently into account by some other journal, and that the fabric has not been revealed elsewhere. They will, after all, submit a paper elsewhere whether it is rejected, however not earlier than that has occurred. The bigger educational publishers are actually introducing software program that may detect duplicate submission, however sadly it could solely accomplish that inside a single publishing home. For a large-volume journal, a big variety of circumstances of double or a number of submission could also be found.
False authorship. It’s attainable {that a} paper be written by surrogate authors, and even, maybe, with the contribution of synthetic intelligence algorithms. That could be a downside that publishers, editors and reviewers will more and more need to confront sooner or later. A number of the bigger educational publishers mechanically confirm authorship. This grew to become vital as soon as it was realised that the names of (largely eminent) students and scientists have been being appropriated as putative authors of papers, often with out their data. One other downside is so-called ‘honorary authorship’ (Al-Herz et al. 2013). On this, students are included as authors with out truly contributing to the writing of the paper, or probably even to the analysis on which it’s primarily based. In lots of circumstances, the actual authors of the paper acquire by associating their names with somebody who’s extra prestigious of their chosen subject than they’re. Moral issues demand that authorship ought to imply precisely that, not merely bestowing kudos on another person’s work. In a single case I not too long ago encountered, the writer of a paper was making an attempt to promote co-authorship with a purpose to pay publication fees.
Falsification of knowledge and outcomes. This, after all, is the traditional type of educational malpractice. When it’s detected on a powerful scale the consequence could be a spectacular scandal. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a means of telling how a lot falsification goes undetected. In sure sciences, the issue extends to clandestine picture manipulation.
Quotation cartels. It’s unhappy to mirror that educational status is usually judged utilizing bibliometric measures. The variety of citations of 1’s work is one such measure, often expressed by the considerably arcane h-index, which is meant to be a measure of educational productiveness. This presupposes that the work is fashionable and has had “impression”. It ignores the query of whether or not the work has been cited as a result of it’s incorrect, deceptive or badly researched. Quotation cartels are teams of teachers who’ve organized to quote one another’s works with a purpose to drive up quotation indices. This detracts from scientific objectivity of their work and often leaves a paper bloated with pointless, and maybe irrelevant, citations.
Different moral violations. A full vary of moral issues will be perused by trying on the web site of COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics (publicationethics.org). This features a very massive variety of anonymised case histories wherein an moral willpower was made by the Committee.
Regardless of the event of more and more highly effective software program to detect malpractice, it’s proliferating as increasingly more students search to publish their work. For many who by no means make it into prestigious mainstream journals, there’s a full undergrowth of ‘predatory’ publishers and journals, whose requirements are low (and even non-existent) and whose fundamental raison d’etre is to generate profits, often by charging authors to publish. Complete lists of ‘predatory’ journals and publishers have been compiled by Jeffrey Beall (Beall 2022). Predatory publishing has in flip spawned a complete business of predatory educational conferences and sham editorial boards (Stratton 2017).
In conclusion, there could also be editors whose actions are questionable, however there are additionally many authors who do the incorrect factor. If one examines one’s motivations, procedures and experiences, it’s completely attainable to behave with integrity and publish educational work whereas avoiding the entire malpractice downside.
References
Al-Herz, W., H. Haider, M. Al-Bahhar and A. Sadeq 2013. Honorary authorship in biomedical journals: how frequent is it and why does it exist? BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics 40(5): 346-348
Beall, J. 2022. Beall’s Listing of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers. https://beallslist.web/ (accessed 30 December 2022).
Graff, H.J. 2022. Editors have turn out to be so wayward that educational authors want a invoice of rights. 18 August 2022 Instances Greater Schooling, London.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/editors-have-become-so-wayward-academic-authors-need-bill-rights
Stratton, S.J. 2017. One other “pricey esteemed colleague” journal electronic mail invitation? Prehospital and Catastrophe Medication 32(1): 1-2.
