Sketch by David of Napoleon crowning himself (LEmpereur Napoleon se couronnant lui-même). Credit: Jacques-Louis David
Their results reveal that in most journals, publications are dispersed throughout a great deal of authors, as one may hope. The authors recognize a subset of biomedical journals where a couple of authors, often members of that journals editorial board, were responsible for an out of proportion number of publications. In addition, the posts authored by these “hyper-prolific” individuals were most likely to be accepted for publication within 3 weeks of their submission, recommending favoritism in journals editorial procedures.
Based upon a big available database, this survey might not perform a comprehensive qualitative analysis of the documents published in such journals presumed of biased editorial decision-making, and extensive additional work will be needed to examine the nature of the articles published by hyper-prolific authors in journals flagged as potentially “nepotistic.”.
Why would this matter? Such “nepotistic journals,” believed of biased editorial decision-making, might be deployed to game productivity-based metrics, which might have a severe ripple effect on decisions about period, research study, and promotion funding. To improve trust in their practices, the authors argue that journals need to be more transparent about their editorial and peer evaluation practices and to stick to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines.
Locher adds, “To highlight questionable editorial behaviors, this study checks out the relationship in between hyper-prolific authors and a journals editorial group.”.
Recommendation: “A study of biomedical journals to discover editorial bias and nepotistic behavior” by Alexandre Scanff, Florian Naudet, Ioana A. Cristea, David Moher, Dorothy V. M. Bishop and Clara Locher, 23 November 2021, PLoS Biology.DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pbio.3001133.
Scientific journals are anticipated to consider research study manuscripts in cold blood and without favor. But in a research study released on November 23rd, 2021, in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Alexandre Scanff, Florian Naudet and Clara Locher from the University of Rennes, and associates, reveal that a subset of journals might be exercising significant predisposition and favoritism.
To determine journals that are presumed of favoritism, the authors explored almost 5 million articles released in between 2015 and 2019 in a sample of 5,468 of biomedical journals indexed in the National Library of Medicine. In particular, they evaluated authorship disparity utilizing 2 possible warnings: (i) the portion of documents in an offered journal that are authored by that journals most respected author, and (ii) a journals Gini index, a statistical measure widely used by economists to explain income or wealth inequalities.