KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Inclusive publishing recognises the value of all validated research in enhancing scientific reproducibility and progress.
• Publishers must embrace inclusive practices to reflect diversity within the scientific landscape.

Inclusive journals value null results, preliminary data, and experimental design papers, which promote reproducibility and can hasten innovation. Unlike selective journals, which prioritise ‘high impact’ discoveries, inclusive journals recognise that research does not need to be ground-breaking to be an advancement. In a Springer Nature article, Ritu Dhand discusses the benefits of inclusive publishing.

COVID-19: a case study

Dhand highlights how the COVID-19 crisis created an unprecedented need for peer-reviewed science. Journals responded by adopting inclusive publishing practices, recognising the importance of preliminary data and innovative methods. The rapid dissemination of pilot studies and null results enabled scientists worldwide to focus precious time and effort on pushing unexplored frontiers. Inclusive publishing proved pivotal in an extraordinary global effort to compress drug discovery timelines from years to months. However, these inclusive practices faded after the pandemic.

The price of selectivity

Dhand notes that 50% of research is unpublished. Rather than lacking scientific rigour, most rejections occur because journal editors consider the research to lack significance. A study prepared for the European Commission estimated that in 2018, €26 billion was wasted on duplicated research in Europe alone.

50% of funded research is unpublished. Rather than lacking scientific rigour, most rejections occur because journal editors consider the research to lack significance.

Value beyond citation metrics

Inclusive journals often publish a high number of papers, leading to lower impact factors. However, the value of the research can be measured by other metrics. For example, over a third of Springer Nature’s inclusive content addresses the UN Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating its societal impact.

Diversity in research publication

Inclusive publication practices also involve increasing the diversity of authors and countries contributing research. Dhand highlights that a similar proportion of research publications are from Western Nations and Asia, yet editorial boards and reviewers remain Western dominated. As key decision makers, individuals in these roles should reflect the diversity of the research communities.

Dhand acknowledges that selective journals will continue to offer a platform for ground-breaking research, but highlights the need for widespread inclusive publication practices to satisfy the evolving needs of science and society.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Open access research is not only cited more often than research behind paywalls, these citations also come from a broader range of fields, institutions, and regions.
• This citation diversity is an important metric for exploring the true impact of research.

Open access publications have the potential to reach a wider audience, evidenced by increased citation counts compared with those behind paywalls. However, a recent large scale study by Dr Chun-Kai Huang and colleagues probes further, challenging the research community to look at the diversity of the readership behind those numbers.

In the largest study of its kind, the authors drew on 19 million research outputs and 420 million citation links, covering 2010–2019, to examine citation diversity. Their data reveal that:

• open access is indeed associated with higher citation counts
• open access consistently provides a ‘citation diversity advantage’ (in other words, open access publications are cited by researchers from a more diverse range of fields, institutions, and regions)
• this citation diversity advantage is stronger for green open access than for gold.

One concern raised by the study is that, while open access increases citation diversity for research from regions typically under-represented in the published literature (eg, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean), the advantage was more pronounced for those areas that already have greater visibility (eg, North America and Northern Europe). The authors question whether this is another instance in which the “rich get richer”, and urge the research community as a whole to advocate for equitable open access.

Open access consistently provides a ‘citation diversity advantage’.

Nevertheless, Dr Huang and colleagues put forward citation diversity as a key metric that looks beyond citation count to explore the impact of research. It would seem that if this measure was commonly used, and valued as highly as the impact factor, we could broaden the reach of medical research.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Altmetrics offer valuable insights beyond numerical scores.
• Researchers can use them to discover suitable platforms to enhance research visibility, promote research sharing, connect with experts, and uncover opportunities for collaboration.

Altmetrics offer an alternative approach to evaluating research impact that extends beyond traditional citation-based metrics, such as journal impact factor and the h-index. A high Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) indicates that research is actively discussed and shared across diverse online platforms, such as news outlets, social media, or in policy documents. However, there is more to altmetrics than assessing impact alone.

In a recent post on the LSE Impact Blog, Andy Tattersall explores 5 ways researchers can leverage altmetrics to gain useful insights into the audiences for their research and find channels to extend the reach of their work.

1. Connect with the right audiences: Altmetrics can help identify blogs covering particular research topics to aid in the selection of suitable platforms for guest post contributions.
2. Incentive to take action: A low AAS can signal that a research output is receiving little online attention. Authors may use this as motivation to promote their work.
3. Encourage open access: Altmetrics provide a compelling reason to share research through open access repositories to increase the likelihood of media coverage and blog discussions.
4. Connect with experts: Altmetrics can be used to identify suitable expert speakers for academic events by gauging which potential speakers receive media or blog coverage for their research outputs.
5. Create opportunities for collaboration: Altmetric tools like Overton and BMJ Impact Analytics allow users to discover if and how their research is cited in policy documents and clinical guidelines, paving the way for collaborations with entities such as charities or governmental organisations.

Although altmetrics have been around for some time now, Tattersall believes that they may still hold untapped potential. Researchers are encouraged to capitalise on this potential to maximise the impact of their work and uncover new opportunities in today’s dynamic academic landscape.

Although altmetrics have been around for some time now,
Tattersall believes that they may still hold untapped potential.

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Social media has become a ubiquitous part of life in the 21^st century. In addition to popular platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, other research-oriented websites and apps (eg ResearchGate, Academia, and Mendeley) have increased in use.

Scientific researchers have begun to leverage these tools to further disseminate their research beyond the traditional peer-reviewed journal publication. In a recent article published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Prof Marco Bardus and colleagues conducted a systematic review to explore how social media affects the impact of health research.

The team identified 7 impact studies, which assessed the effect of social media on the dissemination of research, and 44 correlational studies, which assessed the relationship between Altmetrics and bibliometrics. While their analyses of the impact studies suggested that article views may have increased with social media activity, citations did not. The authors cautioned, though, that the social media interventions tested were too heterogenous to compare—with intervention duration and intensity ranging widely—making it difficult to draw conclusions.

Of the 44 correlational studies (most discussing Twitter and Mendeley), around half found a strong association between traditional citation-based and social media metrics. However, when limiting the analyses to just the 7 correlational studies of high methodological quality, the association was moderate or non-existent.

Despite their inconclusive findings, the authors recommend that  researchers continue to use social media to disseminate health research. The authors note that social media provides the opportunity to reach different, non-specialised readers, and advise researchers to adapt their work for specific target audiences. Sharing research in this way is likely to become increasingly important as publishers take steps to improve patient accessibility of journal articles and as the use of plain language summaries to share scientific content with the public continues to grow.

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Summary by Kristian Clausen MPH from Aspire Scientific

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With thanks to our sponsor, Aspire Scientific Ltd

Traditionally, research misconduct has largely fallen into three types — fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. But, in the digital age of scientific publishing and with the increasing use of metrics, new forms of scientific manipulation are emerging that do not affect the research within an article but do enhance its impact, so-called ‘post-production misconduct’.

As discussed in a recent essay by Professor Mario Biagioli in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the use of quantitative metrics to measure undefined concepts, such as the ‘impact’ of a paper, has led to individuals gaming the system to their advantage. Professor Biagioli suggests that examples of such approaches may include:

• citation rings, where colleagues agree to extensively cite each other’s articles, regardless of relevance
• coercive citations, where peer reviewers and editors ‘encourage’ authors to cite the reviewers’ own research in order to gain a good review
• creating co-authors from prestigious universities to facilitate publication
• buying a place on an author byline of an article submitted for publication by a writing company
• more radically, hacking journal databases and adding your name to the byline of an accepted article.

Professor Biagioli describes how these practices can increase an academic’s citation metric, which can lead to improved career prospects or financial bonuses. In turn, academics with high citations counts feed into other metrics that are used to assess the ‘excellence’ of universities which, Professor Biagioli suggests, are themselves not immune to practices that manipulate the system to their advantage.

The extent of citation manipulation (or citation hacking as it may be called), either through self-citation, citation rings, or coercive citation, was the subject of another article available as a preprint on bioRxiv and summarised in a Nature news article by Richard Van Noorden. The research carried out by Jonathan D. Wren and Constantin Georgescu used an algorithm to analyse the PubMed database to identify unusual citing patterns.

Their findings suggested that around 16% of authors may have engaged in some kind of reference list manipulation.

Given their results, the authors believe that introducing a system to detect and prevent citation hacking may be warranted.

Professor Biagioli highlights that the difference between this type of misconduct and more traditional methods of scientific manipulation is that it is ongoing, continuing long after the research has been published — impact accumulates as citations increase over time. As long as scientists are rewarded on the basis of metrics such as citation counts, there will always be an incentive for citation hacking: the Nature article concludes that, ultimately, it is this system that will need to change.

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Summary by Alice Wareham PhD, CMPP from Aspire Scientific

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With thanks to our sponsor, Aspire Scientific Ltd