In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.
Monday 21 January 2019
Oh, What A Tangled Web! Citation Network Underscores Editorial Conflicts of Interest
The separation of powers is as important in academic publishing as it is in government.
If readers are to trust the integrity of the editorial and peer
review process, editors need to be insulated from the business of
publishing, which often means keeping them away from their colleagues in
marketing, sales, and advertising.
So important is the separation of powers that some publishers
physically separate editorial offices from business operations and place
them in different cities. If they can’t separate these divisions
physically, they will often develop strong internal policies to minimize
influence. For example, PLOS does not disclose to the editor whether a
submitting author has applied for article processing fee assistance when
reviewing a manuscript.
Similarly, many publishers have explicit rules that prevent editors
from handling their own paper or the papers of authors very closely
associated with them. None of these separations of roles and powers
guarantee that the decision to publish is entirely free of bias, but
they do demonstrate a seriousness in building an institution, a process,
and a product that can be trusted.
Last week, I described a publisher (American Scientific Publishers) that had four of its journals singled out this year by Clarivate Analytics for displaying a “problematic pattern of citations.”
In a series of media questions conducted by email, the publisher, Dr.
Hari Singh Nalwa, was quick to blame Chinese authors for the problem,
before denying that he knew anything of the matter. Nalwa (a name he adopted later in life)
is listed as the “Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer” of
American Scientific Publishers, the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of two of its
journals, and an associate editor for two more. Not only does Nalwa have
a stake in the business and editorial operations of his journals, he is
also the author of several reviews published in the journals in which
he operates as EiC. More surprising is that some of these reviews
include first authors (Eric Singh and Ravina Singh), who appear to be his children. In three papers [1, 2, 3]
published in 2015, Eric Singh lists the “William S. Hart High School,”
located just a few miles from the ASP publications office as his
institutional address. Eric is now an undergraduate in the computer
sciences department at Stanford University. The LinkedIn page for Ravina Singh
states that she worked as an Editorial Assistant and Marketing
Associate for ASP between 2010 and 2016, where she “directed the
editorial efforts of multiple academic publications that are circulated
in over 600 universities worldwide.” Nalwa did not respond to my
questions about family relationships at ASP.
Like the family associated most strongly with ASP, the eight ASP journals indexed in the Web of Science show a curious level of self-dealings, with high levels of citations directed to, and from, other ASP journals. Citation
network contributing to the 2017 Impact Factors of 8 journals published
by American Scientific Publishers (colored). All other journals are
colored grey. The size of each node is scaled to reflect the number of
citations from each source.
[T]he vast majority of citations used to calculate
2017 Journal Impact Factors for some ASP journals came from other ASP
journals.
As should be visually apparent from the above graph, the vast
majority of citations used to calculate 2017 Journal Impact Factors
(JIFs) for some ASP journals came from other ASP journals (see Table
below). For example, 87% (384) of the citations that determined the JIF
score for Journal of Biobased Materials and Bioenergy were from
other ASP journals, leaving just 13% (56) citations from other sources.
If we were to remove ASP citations from Clarivate’s calculations, its
JIF would drop from 2.993 to just 0.381. Similarly, 83% of citations
determining the JIF score for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters
came from other ASP journals. These two journals also share the same
EiC (Dr. Nongyue He). While these percentages should be alarming to most
readers, they apparently are not high enough to invoke editorial
suppression from the Journal Citation Reports.
Last year, the European Geosciences Union conducted an investigation of Artemi Cerdà –an editor suspected of abusing his position to manipulate the citation record to benefit his own journal, Land Degradation and Development,
and his own publications. The publishers of EGU journals (Copernicus
and Wiley) were involved as well. Without the separation of roles and
powers, such an investigation (and ultimate resignation of the EiC)
would not have been possible.
In the case of ASP journals, the founder, owner, CEO, editor, and
author not only occupy the same office suite, but the same chair, with
no separation of roles or powers. It’s like having the President of the
United States overseeing the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative
branches of government with the involvement of his children in various
decision-making positions. With such a concentration of powers in the
hands of a single individual, we shouldn’t expect that ASP will do
anything as a result of Clarivate’s editorial expression of concern
over the problematic pattern of citations in its journals. “This
problem has been resolved so there is nothing to say,” wrote Nalwa in
his response to my inquiry.
All hail the Chief! Table Notes: % JIF Numerator is the percentage of
citations from the citing (donor) journal that form the numerator of the
citing (recipient’s) Journal Impact Factor calculation. % Exchange to
JIF Years is the proportion of citations from donor to recipient that
are considered in the JIF calculation. Source items is the number of
papers used in the denominator of the JIF.
Phil Davis is a
publishing consultant specializing in the statistical analysis of
citation, readership, publication and survey data. He has a Ph.D. in
science communication from Cornell University (2010), extensive
experience as a science librarian (1995-2006) and was trained as a life
scientist. https://phil-davis.org/
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