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 Table of Contents  
REVIEW ARTICLE
Year : 2016  |  Volume : 2  |  Issue : 1  |  Page : 1-4

Publication race: A scientific misbehavior


Department of Public Health Dentistry, Sri Siddhartha Dental College, Tumkur, Karnataka, India

Date of Web Publication25-Jan-2016

Correspondence Address:
Dr. Mythri Halappa
Reader, Department of Public Health Dentistry, Sri Siddhartha Dental College, Tumkur, Karnataka
India
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Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None


DOI: 10.4103/2395-2296.174794

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  Abstract 

Scientific journals have a role to further progress science by providing a platform to communicate new findings and the results of scientific research. Publication of articles is a kind of documentation and journals are one of the most important tools for documentation. Now a day, the electronic publication has a major role in the field of science contributing to accessibility. Like other fields, even publication process has a code of conduct which is called as “publication ethics.” This is a self-regulatory mechanism insisting on integrity on the part of authors, peer reviewers, and publishers to establish higher standards of editorial processing for the research. Violation of publication ethics is a global problem, and it is due to the scientific misbehavior.

Keywords: Authorship criteria, publication ethics, violationAddress for Correspondence:


How to cite this article:
Halappa M. Publication race: A scientific misbehavior. Int J Educ Psychol Res 2016;2:1-4

How to cite this URL:
Halappa M. Publication race: A scientific misbehavior. Int J Educ Psychol Res [serial online] 2016 [cited 2024 Mar 19];2:1-4. Available from: https://www.ijeprjournal.org/text.asp?2016/2/1/1/174794


  Introduction Top


There are many studies among health care professionals and smoking, which says being a health professional one should be a role model and not to smoke.[1] The same applies in many fields of dentistry. Recent trends in the publication of research are nearly shocking. Authorship has gained an importance as it is considered by the employers to evaluate academic personnel for employment, promotion, and tenure.[2] This has set the competitive race in the publication of research. Unfortunately, the competition is not healthy making an abundance of scientific material but not of any value.

Everyone began to race increasing the numbers in all the possible ways violating the publication ethics. Publication ethics has been a topic of debate and views varies regarding the authorship.[2] Authorship guidelines and set of rules to be followed for academic authorship without violating the publication ethics can be understood by knowing criteria's for authorship, ordering sequence, and violation of each stage.


  Criteria for Authorship Top


To brief, in academic publishing, authorship of a work is claimed by those whose intellectual contributions to the completion of the research is described in the work.[3],[4] In these context, authorship means activities other than writing the article; a researcher who comes up with an experimental design and analyzes the data may be considered as an author, even if he had little role in composing the text describing the results. According to some standards, even writing the entire article would not constitute authorship unless the writer was involved in at least one or other phase of the project.[4]

The medical/dental field defines authorship very narrowly. According to the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals,[5] to claim as an author, he/she must satisfy the three conditions:

  • Contributed substantially to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of data, or the analysis and interpretation
  • Drafted or provided critical revision for the study
  • Provided final approval for the study and the version to publish
  • Along with this, each author's agreement is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.


Numerous organizations, universities, and research institutions such as National Institutes of Health, the Society for Neuroscience, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Michigan Medical School, and Washington University have established formal authorship guidelines. In which all of them with consensus clearly states, authors of scientific papers must have contributed in an intellectually significant way to the work and they must be able to take public responsibility for that contribution.[6]

Examples of activities that alone do not qualify as an authorship are acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group or general administrative support; and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. However, these contributions may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators”), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., “served as scientific advisors,” “critically reviewed the study proposal,” “collected data,” “provided and cared for study patients,” and “participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript”).[7]

A frequent words which one come across is honorary authorship or gifted authorship, that is, authorship given to a person who has played no significant role in the work and “ghost authors,” that is, the authors who have worked significantly but their names are not visible in a paper.[5],[6],[7] A particularly serious form of ghost authorship is termed “denial of authorship.”[6],[8] The most typical example of this is individuals who were part of the study are not given authorship or nor given accurate credit in authoring sequence. It is a form of authorship abuse and such act can rightfully be considered a form of plagiarism and therefore considered as a scientific misconduct.[9]

Many of the fraudulent publications listed authors who had made no contribution to the work. In some cases, the authors were not aware that their names were associated with the work even after publication. When the publications were shown to be fraudulent, the “gift authors” were placed in the difficult position of proving that they had not participated in the fraud and rationalizing why they could take no responsibility for the work even though they had accepted authorship of it.[6],[10]


  Violation in Authorship Guidelines Top


  • By writing the text alone for others research or by funding for the study or helping for publication, or by general supervision of the research group and claiming as an author of the research
  • “Honorary,” “guest,” or “gift authorships,” which are defined as the awarding of authorship out of respect or friendship, in an attempt to curry favor, and/or to give the paper a greater sense of legitimacy are considered as authorship abuse [5]
  • “Mutual support” authorships have been defined as an agreement by two or more investigators to place their names on each other's papers to give the appearance of higher productivity is also a form of violation [5],[6]
  • The United States National Academy of Sciences warns that honorary or gift authorship dilute the credit as the people who actually did the work, inflate the credentials of those so “honored,” and make the proper attribution of credit more difficult.[6]


To overcome, a possible measure against honorary authorships many medical journals have abandoned the strict notion of the author, with the flexible notion of the contributor.[10] They demand that each new manuscript must include a statement of responsibility that specifies the contribution of every author with their consent.[6],[11]


  Order of Authorship Top


Rules or the order of multiple authors in a list vary significantly between fields of research but are generally consistent within a particular field.[11] Some fields list authors in order of their degree of involvement in the work, other fields, such as mathematics or engineering list them alphabetically. Historically biologists tended to place a principal investigator last in an author list whereas organic chemists in the first.[12]

Traditionally, the first author contributes most and also receives most of the credit, whereas the position of subsequent authors is usually decided by contribution, alphabetical order, or reverse seniority. Ranking the first or second author in a two-author paper is straightforward, but it is multi-authored then the meaning of position becomes increasingly arbitrary. In simpler way, the order should be in such a way the one contributed substantially to the conception and design of the study will be the first followed by people involved in the acquisition of data or the analysis and interpretation, followed by the one who drafted or provided critical revision of the article or approval.[13]


  Violation in Order of Appearance Top


Many times who has drafted the article or paid money claims as an author or even the first author. Evaluation committees and funding bodies often take the authorship as a sign of successful group leadership and make this criterion in hiring, granting, and for promotion. It is clearly stated in publication rules that intellectual contribution for the study is required to become author itself, and mere funding or drafting is equal to a technical writing and cannot be a researcher of the study. By representing themselves as first authors, they are mistakenly benefited when they actually are not principal investigators.

Kwok has termed the attempt by senior individuals to force their way onto the publications of subordinates and junior investigators in the absence of appropriate intellectual contribution as the “white bull effect” and has argued that such behavior is a form of fraud and scientific misconduct.[6]

To overcome this, each author's contribution has to be mentioned and evaluated by the reviewers. Authors were sometimes included in a list without their permission.[14] Even if this is done with the benign intention to acknowledge some contributions, it is problematic since authors carry responsibility for correctness and thus need to have the opportunity to check the manuscript and possibly demand changes. To overcome this, contribution forms has to be signed by each author so that they are aware of the things. If an author is not informed even after publication, it is against to the ethics as their name has been used.

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal's administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, Ethics Committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more co-authors.

The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely way, and should be available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication. Although the corresponding author has primary responsibility for correspondence with the journal, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommends that editors send copies of all correspondence to all listed authors.[11]


  Number of Publications Top


From the late 17th century to the 1920s, sole authorship was the norm, and the one-paper-one-author model worked well for distributing credit.[6] Today shared authorship is common in most academic disciplines to increase the number of publications.[13],[14] Increase in academic pressure toward research and assumption that increase in number of publications will give security, satisfy the ego one has started in an unethical, and unhealthy competition setting a race violating the basic human values and ethics.

An example for that is an infamous case of fraud and promiscuous authorship of Robert Slutsky, a clinical investigator at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). From 1983 to 1984, it was estimated that Slutsky published 30 articles/year, that is, on average one paper every 10 days. An investigating committee at UCSD questioned how a person can be principal author in a year for so many studies and found that as many as 68 of Slutsky's publications were likely to be fraudulent or of “questionable validity.” Gift authorships were a common feature of Slutsky's publications. The UCSD reports that knowing acceptance of co-authorship by investigators without significant contribution to increase their number of publications work made science a “mockery of authorship of scientific manuscripts and is equal to the perpetuation of research fraud.”[2],[6],[15]

There are many examples like Dr. Gerald Schatten, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, assumed senior authorship ( first author) of one of the publications for which his contribution was writing the text.[6] He was subsequently placed under investigation by the University of Pittsburgh. No evidence was found that Schatten had falsified any aspect of the publication, but he was found guilty of “scientific misbehavior.” The phrase “scientific misbehavior” is probably unfamiliar to most scientists. However, a recent paper in academic medicine defines “scientific misbehavior” as “problematic” or “questionable” behavior and is distinct from scientific misconduct, which is fabrication and falsification of data and plagiarism.[6],[15]


  Standardization in Publication Top


To overcome all these, citations of the articles started as a measure of the “importance” for a research paper in the scientific community, as work of greater significance is likely to be cited more often. The total number of citations for a particular paper refers to the number of other scientific articles citing it in their bibliography. A citation index to researchers is equally considered important as impact factors to journals. For an individual researcher's profile, h index is probably the most often used measure of scientific contribution. The h index refers to a number figure where “h” number of articles of an author has “h” or more citations.[16]

However, there are certain crunching issues involved in computing theses indices as well. First, different services determine the number of citations of published material in different ways, or rather, using different databases. Citation indices obtained from Google Scholar might be numerically greater than those obtained from other indexing services like Scopus. This makes citation index data difficult to compare if derived from different sources. Second, the number of citations in a particular field will depend on the total scientific publications in that area. An important work in sociology may be less frequently cited than an important work in the clinical field. Third, for similar impact articles, those provided through open access may be cited more often than ones requiring paid subscription. Fourth, the use of common keywords may favor the “discovery” of some articles over others during the literature review and hence they may be cited more often. Finally, senior researchers are likely to be cited more often not only because they have lead time in publication history, but also because of their reputation and camaraderie with other researchers in the field.[16]


  Conclusion Top


Violation of publication ethics such as plagiarism, a duplicate submission, gift authorship, fake affiliation, ghost authorship, pressured authorship, and fraud (falsification and fabrication) is all because of scientific misbehavior. It is a psychological distress that corrodes the integrity of scientific research. The inferiority complexes present in the persons or the want of achieving something overnight or an attempt to prove themselves due to their own insecurities makes one to take part in any type of publication ethics violating measures and be a part of publication race rather than becoming a researcher.

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest.

 
  References Top

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Ananda SR, Mythri H. Prevalence and comparison of cigarette smoking habits among health care professional studies. Indian J Res Pharm Biotechnol 2014;2:1366-70.  Back to cited text no. 1
    
2.
Shekar KS, Srinivas DK. What is not taught in medical colleges. Bengaluru: Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences; 2011. p. 490.  Back to cited text no. 2
    
3.
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4.
Dickson JG, Conner RN, Adair KT. Guidelines for authorship of scientific articles. Wildl Soc Bull 1978;6:260-1.  Back to cited text no. 4
    
5.
Claxton LD. Scientific authorship. Part 2. History, recurring issues, practices, and guidelines. Mutat Res 2005;589:31-45.  Back to cited text no. 5
    
6.
Strange K. Authorship: Why not just toss a coin? Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 2008;295:C567-75.  Back to cited text no. 6
    
7.
Guidance on Authorship in Scholarly or Scientific Publications. Available from: http://www.provost.yale.edu/WhatWeDo/AcademicIntegrity. [Last accessed on 2015 Feb 12].  Back to cited text no. 7
    
8.
Moffatt B, Elliott C. Ghost marketing: Pharmaceutical companies and ghostwritten journal articles. Perspect Biol Med 2007;50:18-31.  Back to cited text no. 8
    
9.
Institutes of Health. Guidelines for the Conduct of Research in the Intramural Research Program at NIH. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health; 2007. Available from: https://www.training.nih.gov/nih_resources. [Last accessed on 2015 Feb 15].  Back to cited text no. 9
    
10.
Kempers RD. Ethical issues in biomedical publications. Fertil Steril 2002;77:883-8.  Back to cited text no. 10
    
11.
Stewart WW, Feder N. The integrity of the scientific literature. Nature 1987;325:207-14.  Back to cited text no. 11
    
12.
Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors. Available from: http://www.icmje.org/./roles./defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors. [Last accessed on 2015 Feb 15].  Back to cited text no. 12
    
13.
Tscharntke T, Hochberg ME, Rand TA, Resh VH, Krauss J. Author sequence and credit for contributions in multiauthored publications. PLoS Biol 2007;5:e18.  Back to cited text no. 13
    
14.
Parasuraman S, Raveendran R, Mueen Ahmed KK. Violation of publication ethics in manuscripts: Analysis and perspectives. J Pharmacol Pharmacother 2015;6:94-7.  Back to cited text no. 14
[PUBMED]  Medknow Journal  
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Locke R. Laboratory fraud: Another damned by publications. Nature 1986;324:401.  Back to cited text no. 15
    
16.
Siddharth S, Divya S. Citation indices: Measuring the impact of published work. Indian J Psychol Med 2015;37:376.  Back to cited text no. 16
    




 

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  In this article
Abstract
Introduction
Criteria for Aut...
Violation in Aut...
Order of Authorship
Violation in Ord...
Number of Public...
Standardization ...
Conclusion
References

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