The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.
Journalology #61: China and research integrity
Hello fellow journalologists, Last week’s newsletter about the underlying causes for the job redundancies at Frontiers generated a lot of interest. If you’re one of the 200 new subscribers receiving Journalology for the first time, welcome. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it in the weeks and months to come. Last week’s analysis left two questions unanswered in my mind. I’ve spent the past few days going down a bibliometric rabbit hole trying to work out:
As a reminder, here’s the graph of article output over time, which I included in last week’s newsletter. The data were taken from Digital Science’s Dimensions and include all article types. Based on personal past experience, I suspected that papers coming from China would be part of the story. So I took at look at the author demographic of Frontiers articles over time. The graph below shows the number of research articles published per month between December 2021 and December 2023 that had at least one author from each of the countries listed (I’ve included the top 7 countries by article volume; source = Dimensions). It’s clear from this graph that much of the article growth that Frontiers experienced in 2022 was due to papers with at least one author from China. There was some growth in other countries too, but China was the major contributor. That growth was lumpy, though. The high point for articles with an author from China was September 2022, when ~5400 articles were published. Article numbers then dropped quickly; in December 2022 fewer than 3000 articles were published. There was a dip in December for papers with authors from other regions, but it wasn’t anywhere near as steep, in either absolute or relative terms. Then, in January 2023, there was a huge rebound, with more than 5000 research articles published from China in that month, then, in February, the output dropped back to ~3000 articles. There will always be fluctuations in published article volumes each month, but these swings in output are unlike anything I’ve seen before. By December 2023 the number of articles from China had dropped down to 1500. Output from the USA and the largest European countries dropped too, but not as much as articles from China. As I explained in the previous issue of Journalology, this can’t be explained purely by increased rejection rates; submissions must have fallen considerably too. Here’s another way to look at the data. I used Dimensions to do two searches: (1) A search for research articles with at least one author from China; (2) A search for research articles with no authors from China (NOT China). Because the two sets are mutually exclusive we can also plot the data in this way: However, the above two graphs give a misleading picture of the trend in 2023 because Q1 2023 was so different to Q4 2023 . The following bar chart shows the number of research articles published per week with at least one author from China (orange) or with no authors from China (blue) in 2022 and 2023. Note how the blue bars are much higher than the orange bars in the second half of 2023. Something happened to change the submission habits of Chinese authors to Frontiers journals last year. Were authors from China discouraged from submitting to Frontiers journals by their institutions? That seems the most likely explanation, but I hadn’t heard of Frontiers journals being on any watch lists. Please let me know if you have any information about that. Let’s now turn our attention to the January 2023 spike in publications. The following graph plots the number of research articles (all countries) published in Frontiers journals each week in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. The Christmas break meant that very few papers were published in week 52 of 2022. Publishing staff frequently take holidays at that time of year, so it’s understandable that article output drops then. However, that can’t be the whole reason for the big spikes in weeks 1 and 2; it seems likely that some papers that could have been published in December 2022 were held over until January 2023. Let’s go through the numbers. In weeks 49, 50 and 51 on average 1655 research articles were published per week. Only 83 research articles were published in week 52, which means that 1572 articles were carried over into 2023. Fair enough. However, in the first 3 weeks of 2023 a total of 7236 research articles were published; if we subtract the 1572 articles that were carried over from 2022, that leaves 5664 articles or an average of 1888 per week over the first 3 weeks of 2023. Put another way around 700 articles were likely deferred from 2022 into 2023 for reasons other than the Christmas holidays. (We could test this hypothesis by looking at the submission-to-publication times for different monthly cohorts; I haven't done that analysis, but perhaps someone else would like to have a go if they have the time and inclination.) The graph below combines data from two Dimensions searches. The first search was for research articles that include at least one author from China (orange bars). The second search was for research articles that include no authors from China (blue bars). If you look closely at the last few weeks of 2022 you can see that most weeks the blue bars were higher than the orange bars. But in the first 4 weeks of Q1 2023 the orange bars (papers from China) are much higher than the blue bars. The below table shows the number of research articles published in the last 3 weeks of 2022 (not including week 52) and the first 3 weeks of 2023. The number of papers from China increased by 1708 (72% increase), whereas the number of papers without an author from China increased by 564 (22% increase). I haven’t done a formal statistical analysis, but this seems unlikely to be due to chance. This suggests that research articles from China were preferentially selected to be deferred to Q1 2023. This is problematic from an editorial perspective; a core tenet of good editorial practice is that authors are treated fairly and equally, no matter where they’re based. I’m not sure why Frontiers would want to defer papers from China to the next calendar year. If you have a theory, please let me know. The reasons for the Q1 2023 bump could be editorial or commercial. One possible commercial explanation is that papers were deferred from Q4 2022 to Q1 2023 to provide an initial boost to APC revenues in the 2023 calendar year. Presumably by the end of Q4 2022 the Frontiers management team could see that submissions were falling and that 2023 could be a tough year commercially. So they may have decided to defer publication of some papers from 2022 to 2023, in order to realise the APC revenues in the next calendar year, and chose mainly papers from China to be deferred. It’s a relatively small volume of papers though, equivalent to, perhaps, $2m in revenue. Possible? Yes. Likely? I’m not so sure. There could be editorial reasons for the deferred papers too. Publishers have long tried to front load the early months of the year to give a boost to their impact factors. Matt Hodgkinson reminded me on LinkedIn this week of an article by Phil Davis published in The Scholarly Kitchen in 2018, which included this quote: A paper published in the December issue of a journal has aged only 13 months when it has completed its second year of publication. In contrast, a paper published the January issue is 25 months old — almost a year older. Using our school grade analogy, children who are born just before the age cut-off are the youngest in their class, whereas children born just after the cut-off can be nearly a year older. For children and papers alike, age can make a lot of difference on performance in their early years. To test that hypothesis I searched for Review articles published by Frontiers in 2022 and 2023 (all countries, not just China). Frontiers publishes a lot of reviews; the ratio of reviews to research articles is very high, which is the main reason why the impact factors of Frontiers journals are so competitive. The graph below shows the number of review articles (from all countries) published each week in Frontiers journals. If Frontiers was front loading January to boost citations, then we’d expect lots of reviews published that month. However, that didn’t happen last year. The volume of review articles did drop over time, though. You may ask why I’ve spent so much time over the past few weeks digging into Frontiers’ publishing output. Indeed, I’ve asked myself the same question! I don’t have a grudge against Frontiers; I’ve been impressed with how they’ve created a brand from nothing and become one of the market leaders in open access publishing. (I’m less impressed with their corporate PR, which takes spin to a whole new level, but that’s a story for another day.) Over the past few years Frontiers has taken market share from society publishers, especially in biomedicine. Many publishers have been adversely affected by Frontiers’ rapid growth, which, we must remember, is because Frontiers provides a service that authors appreciate. There are lots of people who are watching Frontiers with interest because it has direct implications for their own publishing programmes. Hopefully the last two Journalology newsletters have helped readers to better understand what happened to Frontiers last year. I certainly learned a lot by writing them. NewsPaper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation findsSo cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, in partnership with Wise and other industry experts, identified several paper mills and more than 30 editors of reputable journals who appear to be involved in this type of activity. Many were guest editors of special issues, which have been flagged in the past as particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are edited separately from the regular journal. But several were regular editors or members of journal editorial boards. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Science (Frederik Joelving) JB: This is unsurprising and shocking in equal measure. This week’s “must read”. Action against paper millsThe publishing world is faced with a large and problematic pollution of the publication record with false and inaccurate research, risking public trust in research, introducing dangers to public health and medicine, and undermining the research process. Many of these papers originate from third party commercial agencies offering services to authors (“paper mills”) for the creation of fake or manipulated data and articles.
All stakeholders believe that the issue of paper mills is a serious threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) is working to support editors, journals, publishers, universities and research institutes in addressing the issue of paper mills and considers this a high priority for all stakeholders involved in research and publication integrity. COPE supports the United2Act consensus statement on action against paper mills and will be taking part in its action plan. We urge the research community to take immediate action at every level of the publishing process to identify and halt these fraudulent activities. We encourage members to continue the discussion around this through COPE and the STM Integrity Hub.
COPE (announcement) JB: See also: Wiley endorse United2Act initiative and United2Act consensus statement on action against paper mills. The battle against paper mills and other issues around research integrity will be one of the key themes of 2024. I’m particularly interested in seeing how new tools can be used to assess the scholarly record at the publisher level. The lessons from 2023 were clear: if a publisher does a bad job of filtering out fabricated papers its brand and bottom line will suffer. Journal Comparison Service: analysis of the 2022 dataThe broadly similar average and median APCs across both disciplines is surprising, as the common perception is that APCs in SSH titles tend to be lower than in MHS journals. This, however, may be an artefact of the data and the fact that one publisher – Wiley (excluding Hindawi) – is responsible for publishing over 60% of all journals listed in the JCS. Plan S (Robert Kiley) JB: I chose this quote because it’s important to remember how skewed this data set is. I’m not a fan of breaking down the price of an APC in this way; I’m not convinced that the numbers mean very much. For large publishers, a large chunk of the cost is shared allocation (overhead for HR, IT, Legal, Finance etc) which can be allocated to individual business units in many different ways. ResearchGate and Sage expand Journal Home partnership to cover 100 journalsResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and Sage, a leading global academic publisher, are excited to announce an expanded partnership that promises greater research impact for Sage open access journals’ authors. This collaboration more than doubles the number of open access Sage journals now available through ResearchGate’s Journal Home, bringing the total to 100. ResearchGate (press release) JB: Last year ResearchGate announced a series of pilots with publishers. It will be interesting to see how many of those pilots are scaled up; is this the first of many? C&EN ran a story this week about how some academics chose to delete their accounts because ResearchGate partnered with MDPI. Launch of Scopus AI to Help Researchers Navigate the World of ResearchElsevier, a global leader in scientific information and data analytics, today launches Scopus AI – a generative AI product to help researchers and research institutions get fast and accurate summaries and research insights that support collaboration and societal impact.
Scopus AI is based on Scopus’ trusted content from over 27,000 academic journals, from more than 7,000 publishers worldwide, with over 1.8 billion citations, and includes over 17 million author profiles. Scopus content is vetted by an independent board of world-renowned scientists and librarians who represent the major scientific disciplines.
Since the alpha launch in August 2023, thousands of researchers across the world have tested Scopus AI. Their feedback has reinforced that, as generative AI evolves, researchers want trustworthy, cited research that is relevant and highly personalized to their needs.
Elsevier (press release) CACTUS and Elsevier join hands to bring 19M+ Elsevier research abstracts to researchers' mobile devicesThis content partnership between CACTUS and Elsevier represents a significant milestone, furthering the shared mission of making research more accessible to people around the world. The integration of Elsevier's research content will significantly enhance R Discovery's extensive research database of more than 115 million research articles, including 40 million open access articles, across 9.5 million topics and over 32,000 journals. This makes R Discovery the only mobile app to host Elsevier's high-impact content in one place for anyone who wants to discover and read quality research. Cactus Communications (press release) Other news storiesASM expands clinically relevant research with launch of ASM Case Reports AGU/CHORUS Data Citation Best Practices Project Summary ‘Nonsensical content’: Springer Nature journal breaks up with a paper on a love story Publisher parts ways with editor of five journals who published his own studies on Islamic practices A publisher makes an error in a publication about errors Three enhancements to aid search and discoverability Toward open research information - Introducing the Information & Openness focal area at CWTS Exclusive: Paper-mill articles buoyed Spanish dean’s research output Becaris Authors To Benefit From Enago’s Editing Support OpinionSociety Publishers Respond to Plan S "Towards Responsible Publishing" ProposalThe scale and urgency of the challenges faced by the scholarly communications community, such as threats to research integrity and trust in science, AI, and diversity and inclusion, require us all to work more collaboratively and make important improvements where we can. We support the call for a conversation about the future of scholarly communication. Yet, if we want to make real, sustained progress, it is crucial to take a balanced view of the current system and explore fully where publishers — in particular the society publishers which represent specialist communities — can evolve existing, successful processes and systems before considering the replacement of the entire system. The Scholarly Kitchen (IOP Publishing, AIP Publishing, American Physical Society) JB: It would be oh-so-easy to give up engaging with cOAlition S. However, it’s important that publishers try to get their voices heard. This collaboration between the three largest physics publishers is helpful. This week Research Consulting thanked the 60 people who took part in the ’Towards Responsible Publishing' focus groups. The cynic in me thinks it’s unlikely that the sample was representative of academia. A review of our first yearTo learn about bioengineering research and connect with the scientific community, outreach has been an important pillar for us. We participated in several virtual and in-person conferences, gave publishing talks and Nature Masterclasses, and performed lab visits all over the world for a total of 75 meetings in 13 countries. Nature Reviews Bioengineering (unsigned editorial) JB: The infographic is worth glancing at as it gives as good indication of how much editorial outreach Nature journals do. They are successful not just because of their brand, but because the editors are regularly engaging with their communities. Put Community at the Center of Your Publishing ProcessRegala also recommends paying attention to when authors publish outside the association. When AUA authors are published in larger, more influential journals, staff reaches out to congratulate them and ask if they would write a summary for AUA’s news platform. And when AUA authors publish in competing journals, Regala sends a congratulatory email and asks what the association can do to encourage them to submit to AUA next time.
“It’s all about the human touch; it makes an impact on our authors when we reach out,” she said. “At the end of the day, we’re all looking for connections, and I think authors are looking for their association publications to become communities where they can create strong connections for years to come.”
Associations Now (Hannah Carvalho interviews Jennifer Regala) JB: This is another great example of how to build connections with a community. Desk outreach via email and video calls can be effective too. Jennifer is spot on. The human touch goes a long way. Other opinion articlesCustom GPTs - What is the Point? Authors from wealthy countries cannot all pay publishing fees (paywall) Detecting fraud in scientific publications | Interview with Cyril Labbé The robot uprising is here: Is scholarly publishing ready? Augmenting Scholarly Publishing: Intelligent Emerging Tools & Trends An Open Letter on Open Access Adapting peer review for the future: Digital disruptions and trust in peer review Journal ClubDeterminants of manuscript submissions to fully open access journals: elasticity to article processing charges If manuscript submissions to individual journals were sensitive to APC changes, publishers would hesitate to raise APCs due to the risk of revenue reduction. However, this study reveals that manuscript submissions are insensitive to APCs, suggesting that publishers are able to easily raise APCs. Scientometrics (Sumiko Asai) JB: I doubt this will come as a massive surprise to readers of this newsletter. The evidence base presented in this paper is fairly weak, but the bottom line chimes with received wisdom. And finally...The two key themes of this week’s newsletter have been China and research integrity. So it seems apt to finish off with extracts from articles written by two fellow consultants, Rob Johnson and Nicko Goncharoff, that cover those topics. Here’s an extract from Rob’s article, Unpacking the new Chinese Guidelines for Responsible Research Conduct While most of these requirements should already be standard practice for Western publishers, the consequences of falling short are significant. If a journal makes it onto the government's 'early warning list' then Chinese researchers will get a slap on the wrist from their employer - a clear signal to submit future publications elsewhere. Meanwhile, journals on one of many Chinese 'blacklists' are likely to see submissions drop off a cliff, as these publications 'will not be recognised various reviews and evaluations, and related publication expenses will not be reimbursed'. And here’s one from Nicko’s article, Building bridges with China around research integrity CAS NSL organised a Memorandum of Understanding in which signatories expressed support for establishing an international research integrity reference group. The reference group will act to serve as bridge between China and the global research community around research integrity, and address some of the communication and cultural obstacles that prevent wider and more consistent implementation of research integrity best practices. It will have Chinese and international representatives of organisations directly involved in research integrity, including Chinese universities and research institutes, Chinese and international publishers, research integrity advocacy groups, and ideally funders. Such a group could provide a valuable forum for addressing key research integrity challenges, align work in China with that of international groups, formulate policy recommendations and coordinate academic and industry collaborations. Both articles are worth reading in their entirety. Until next time, James |
Journalology
James Butcher
The Journalology newsletter helps editors and publishing professionals keep up to date with scholarly publishing, and guides them on how to build influential scholarly journals.
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