Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have become central in many research fields, particularly medicine. They offer the highest level of evidence in evidence-based medicine and support the development and revision of clinical practice guidelines, which offer recommendations for clinicians caring for patients with specific diseases and conditions. This review summarizes the concepts of systematic reviews and meta-analyses and provides guidance on reviewing and assessing such papers. A systematic review refers to a review of a research question that uses explicit and systematic methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research. In contrast, a meta-analysis is a quantitative statistical analysis that combines individual results on the same research question to estimate the common or mean effect. Conducting a meta-analysis involves defining a research topic, selecting a study design, searching literature in electronic databases, selecting relevant studies, and conducting the analysis. One can assess the findings of a meta-analysis by interpreting a forest plot and a funnel plot and by examining heterogeneity. When reviewing systematic reviews and meta-analyses, several essential points must be considered, including the originality and significance of the work, the comprehensiveness of the database search, the selection of studies based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, subgroup analyses by various factors, and the interpretation of the results based on the levels of evidence. This review will provide readers with helpful guidance to help them read, understand, and evaluate these articles.
Purpose Given the impact of information technologies, the research environment for humanities scholars is transforming into digital scholarship. This study presents a foundational investigation for developing digital scholarship (DS) research support services. It also proposes a plan for sustainable information services through examining the current status of DS in Korea, as well as accessing, processing, implementing, disseminating, and preserving interdisciplinary digital data.
Methods Qualitative interview data were collected from September 7 to 11, 2020. The interviews were conducted with scholars at the research director level who had participated in the DS research project in Korea. Data were coded using Nvivo 14, and cross-analysis was performed among researchers to extract central nodes and derive service elements.
Results This study divided DS into five stages: research plan, research implementation, publishing results, dissemination of research results, and preservation and reuse. This paper also presents the library DS information services required for each stage. The characteristic features of the DS research cycle are the importance of collaboration, converting analog resources to data, data modeling and technical support for the analysis process, humanities data curation, drafting a research data management plan, and international collaboration.
Conclusion Libraries should develop services based on open science and data management plan policies. Examples include a DS project liaison service, data management, datafication, digital publication repositories, a digital preservation plan, and a web archiving service. Data sharing for humanities research resources made possible through international collaboration will contribute to the expansion of new digital culture research.
Purpose This survey study aimed to investigate the current status, issues, and needs related to Clinical Endoscopy (CE), the official international journal of the Korean Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (KSGE).
Methods A 10-item survey was emailed to domestic KSGE members between May 1 and May 15, 2023. The results were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Results In total, 216 complete responses were analyzed. Most respondents (46.8%) read CE once or twice monthly. The proportion of respondents who read the journal once or twice a year or did not read it at all was quite high, at 36.6%. The most informative article type was review articles (53%), and the least-read type was editorials (33%). Ninety-nine respondents (45.8%) stated that they did not want to submit their articles to CE because CE is not a Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) journal (38.4%). Eighty-nine respondents (41.2%) did not cite CE articles in their manuscripts. Furthermore, 41.2% of the respondents declined review invitations because they were too busy (73.0%). The two most common requests for CE were to increase the number of guidelines and review articles (38.0%) and to improve the journal quality (34.7%).
Conclusion Although CE is a representative journal of KSGE, the level of interest and concern for CE among society members was relatively low. Nonetheless, this survey offers valuable insights into the needs and current status of CE, paving the way for its further development. It is clear that more efforts and investments from the society and the editorial board are necessary.
Purpose This study aimed to ascertain the attitudes of Korean scholarly journal editors and publishers toward research data sharing policies and the publication of data papers through a survey.
Methods Between May 16 and June 16, 2023, a SurveyMonkey survey link was distributed to 388 societies, including 270 member societies of the Korean Council of Science Editors and 118 societies that used an e-submission system operated by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. A total of 78 societies (20.1%) responded, from which 72 responses (18.6%) were analyzed after excluding invalid responses.
Results Out of the representatives of 72 journals, 20 editors or publishers (27.8%) declared a data sharing policy. Those journals that did not have such a policy often expressed uncertainty about their future plans regarding this issue. A common concern was a potential decrease in manuscript submissions, primarily due to the increased workload this policy might impose on editors and manuscript editors. Four respondents (5.6%) had published data papers, with two of them including this as a publication type in their author guidelines. Concerns about copyright and data licensing were cited as drawbacks to publishing data papers. However, the expansion of publication types and the promotion of data reuse were viewed as benefits.
Conclusion Korean scholarly journal editors’ and publishers’ attitudes toward data sharing policy and publishing data papers are not yet favorable. More training courses are needed to raise awareness of data sharing platforms and emphasize the need for research data sharing and data papers.
The aim of this study was to share our experience with plagiarism detection in manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Surgical Sciences, a Romania-based medical journal, between 2020 and 2021. We analyzed similarity score reports from 200 articles submitted consecutively for publication between 2020 and 2021 generated by PlagScan, a software tool for plagiarism detection. The similarity score ranged from 0% to 92.4%, and 45 articles presented scores over 25.0%. According to PlagScan’s results, more than half of the submitted articles had a similarity score of more than 10% and one-third of them had a similarity score above 20%. Among submitted manuscripts with a similarity score of less than 20%, a larger proportion of the original research and review manuscripts than case reports used more than 10 sources. All articles with a similarity score below 20% were evaluated qualitatively before the final decision of rejection.
The COPE / DOAJ / OASPA / WAME Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing: A Critical Analysis Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Salim Moussa ETHICS IN PROGRESS.2024; 15(1): 130. CrossRef
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The specialized literature abounds in recommendations about the most desirable technical ways of answering reviewers’ comments on a submitted manuscript. However, not all publications mention authors’ and/or reviewers’ feelings or reactions about what they may read or write in their respective reports, and even fewer publications tackle openly what may or may not be said in a set of answers to a reviewer’s comments. In answering reviewers’ comments, authors are often attentive to the technical or rational aspects of the task but might forget some of its relational aspects. In their answers, authors are expected to make every effort to abide by reviewers’ suggestions, including discussing major criticisms, editing the illustrations, or implementing minor corrections; abstain from questioning a reviewer’s competence or willingness to write a good review, including full and attentive reading and drafting useful comments; clearly separate their answers to each reviewer; avoid skipping, merging, or reordering reviewers’ comments; and, finally, specify the changes made. Authors are advised to call on facts, logic, and some diplomacy, but never on artifice, concealment, or flattery. Failing to do so erodes the trust between authors and reviewers, whereas integrity is expected and highly valued. The guiding principle should always be honesty.
Technological advances have been an integral part of discussions related to journal publishing in recent years. This article presents Get Full Text Research (GetFTR), a discovery solution launched by five major publishers: the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis Group, and Wiley. These founding publishers announced the development of this new solution in 2019, and its pilot service was launched just 4 months later. The GetFTR solutions streamlines access to not only open access resources but also to subscription-based resources. The publishers have assured that this solution will be beneficial for all relevant stakeholders involved in the journal publication process, including publishers, researchers, integrators, and libraries. They highlighted that researchers will have the ability to access published articles with minimal effort or steps, benefitting from existing (single sign-on) access technologies, ideally accessing the article PDF with a single click. While GetFTR is free for integrators and researchers, publishers are required to pay an annual subscription fee. To lower the barrier for participation, GetFTR supports smaller publishers by offering them a discount based on the number of digital object identifiers (DOIs), as recorded in Crossref data. While this project appears promising, some initial concerns were raised, particularly regarding user data control, which the project has responded to by more closely engaging the librarian community and by providing further information on how GetFTR supports user privacy.
As a community, it is impossible to ignore the fact that sharing research and information related to research is a much broader proposition than sharing an article, book, or conference paper. In supporting an evolving scholarly record, making connections between research organizations, contributors, actions, and objects helps give a more complete picture of the scholarly record, which open infrastructure organizations like Crossref call the research nexus. Crossref is working to support this evolution and is thinking about the metadata it collects via its members and that it supplements and curates, to make it broader than the rigid structures traditionally provided by content types. Furthermore, because of Crossref’s commitment to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), this network of information will be global and openly available for anyone in the community to access and reuse. The present article describes this vision in more detail, including why it is increasingly important to support the links between research and elements that contribute or are related to that research; how Crossref, its members, and the wider community can support it; and the work and planning Crossref is doing to make it easier to achieve this.
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Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions received the top-ranking Journal Impact Factor―9.3—in the category of Education, Scientific Disciplines in the 2023 Journal Citation Ranking by Clarivate Sun Huh Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions.2024; 21: 16. CrossRef