Amend:An integrated platform of retracted papers and concerned papers

Purpose:The notable increase in retraction papers has attracted considerable attention from diverse stakeholders.Various sources are now offering information related to research integrity,including concerns voiced on social media,disclosed lists of paper mills,and retraction notices accessible through journal websites.However,despite the availability of such resources,there remains a lack of a unified platform to consolidate this information,thereby hindering efficient searching and cross-referencing.Thus,it is imperative to develop a comprehensive platform for retracted papers and related concerns.This article aims to introduce“Amend,”a platform designed to integrate information on research integrity from diverse sources.Design/methodology/approach:The Amend platform consolidates concerns and lists of problematic articles sourced from social media platforms(e.g.,PubPeer,For Better Science),retraction notices from journal websites,and citation databases(e.g.,Web of Science,CrossRef).Moreover,Amend includes investigation and punishment announcements released by administrative agencies(e.g.,NSFC,MOE,MOST,CAS).Each related paper is marked and can be traced back to its information source via a provided link.Furthermore,the Amend database incorporates various attributes of retracted articles,including citation topics,funding details,open access status,and more.The reasons for retraction are identified and classified as either academic misconduct or honest errors,with detailed subcategories provided for further clarity.Findings:Within the Amend platform,a total of 32,515 retracted papers indexed in SCI,SSCI,and ESCI between 1980 and 2023 were identified.Of these,26,620(81.87%)were associated with academic misconduct.The retraction rate stands at 6.64 per 10,000 articles.Notably,the retraction rate for non-gold open access articles significantly differs from that for gold open access articles,with this disparity progressively widening over the years.Furthermore,the reasons for retractions have shifted from traditional individual behaviors like falsification,fabrication,plagiarism,and duplication to more organized large-scale fraudulent practices,including Paper Mills,Fake Peer-review,and Artificial Intelligence Generated Content(AIGC).Research limitations:The Amend platform may not fully capture all retracted and concerning papers,thereby impacting its comprehensiveness.Additionally,inaccuracies in retraction notices may lead to errors in tagged reasons.Practical implications:Amend provides an integrated platform for stakeholders to enhance monitoring,analysis,and research on academic misconduct issues.Ultimately,the Amend database can contribute to upholding scientific integrity.Originality/value:This study introduces a globally integrated platform for retracted and concerning papers,along with a preliminary analysis of the evolutionary trends in retracted papers.

An explorative study on document type assignment of review articles in Web of Science,Scopus and journals’websites

Purpose:Accurately assigning the document type of review articles in citation index databases like Web of Science(WoS)and Scopus is important.This study aims to investigate the document type assignation of review articles in Web of Science,Scopus and Publisher’s websites on a large scale.Design/methodology/approach:27,616 papers from 160 journals from 10 review journal series indexed in SCI are analyzed.The document types of these papers labeled on journals’websites,and assigned by WoS and Scopus are retrieved and compared to determine the assigning accuracy and identify the possible reasons for wrongly assigning.For the document type labeled on the website,we further differentiate them into explicit review and implicit review based on whether the website directly indicates it is a review or not.Findings:Overall,WoS and Scopus performed similarly,with an average precision of about 99% and recall of about 80%.However,there were some differences between WoS and Scopus across different journal series and within the same journal series.The assigning accuracy of WoS and Scopus for implicit reviews dropped significantly,especially for Scopus.Research limitations:The document types we used as the gold standard were based on the journal websites’labeling which were not manually validated one by one.We only studied the labeling performance for review articles published during 2017-2018 in review journals.Whether this conclusion can be extended to review articles published in non-review journals and most current situation is not very clear.Practical implications:This study provides a reference for the accuracy of document type assigning of review articles in WoS and Scopus,and the identified pattern for assigning implicit reviews may be helpful to better labeling on websites,WoS and Scopus.Originality/value:This study investigated the assigning accuracy of document type of reviews and identified the some patterns of wrong assignments.

The Unique citing documents Journal Impact Factor(Uniq-JIF)as a supplement for the standard Journal Impact Factor

1 A new type of impact factor The Unique citing documents Journal Impact Factor(Uniq-JIF)is defined as follows:Uniq-JIF=Number of unique citing documents/Number of citable items(1)We note that formula(1)is given in a generic form.In concrete applications,one must state the publication for which the Uniq-JIF is calculated(a journal,an edited book,a conference proceedings).

Node2vec Representation for Clustering Journals and as A Possible Measure of Diversity

Purpose: To investigate the effectiveness of using node2 vec on journal citation networks to represent journals as vectors for tasks such as clustering, science mapping, and journal diversity measure.Design/methodology/approach: Node2 vec is used in a journal citation network to generate journal vector representations. Findings: 1. Journals are clustered based on the node2 vec trained vectors to form a science map. 2. The norm of the vector can be seen as an indicator of the diversity of journals. 3. Using node2 vec trained journal vectors to determine the Rao-Stirling diversity measure leads to a better measure of diversity than that of direct citation vectors.Research limitations: All analyses use citation data and only focus on the journal level.Practical implications: Node2 vec trained journal vectors embed rich information about journals, can be used to form a science map and may generate better values of journal diversity measures.Originality/value: The effectiveness of node2 vec in scientometric analysis is tested. Possible indicators for journal diversity measure are presented.

Fighting Against Academic Misconduct:What Can Scientometricians Do?

As the number of published papers being retracted is increasing dramatically and is higher than ever before, the phenomenon of retraction has aroused widespread concern in the research community all over the world. It has been mentioned that large-scale retracted papers from China appeared in journals of major publishers(Tang, 2019). After we classified these retracted papers published between 2011 and 2021 based on their retraction reasons(1), we see that 8,594 cases are retracted because of academic misconduct. The “academic misconduct” problem has become a common issue faced by academic communities worldwide, including China.

The Nobel Prize winners will be among these candidates

“Who will win the Nobel Prize this year” attracts lots of attentions at every year’s end of September and begining of October recent years. Several prizes, e.g. the Wolf prize, Lasker prize, Gairdner prize, etc., have been treated as the predictors of the Nobel Prize.

Large language models and scientific publishing

ChatGPT and similar large language models(LLMs)have rapidly caught the sci-entific and popular imagination,inviting reflections on their potential and risk for science(Grimaldi&Ehrler,2023;Nature,2023;Thorp,2023;van Dis et al.,2023).

jdisCovid-related Papers Contribute 50%on the JIF of High Impact Medicine Journals

On June 28,2022,Journal Citation Reports 2021 was released,which is also the first time that Covid19-related publications have been included in the calculation of Journal Impact Factor(JIF).Journals in medical fields like infectious diseases,critical care,public health have significant increase in JIF.Here,by excluding the citations from and to Covid19-related papers,we identified the top 10 medical journals having the largest contribution of Covid-related papers on JIF as shown in Table 1.Prestigious medical journals are included in these identified journals.

Science map of academic misconduct

After a whistleblower exposed a large-scale fraud,there has been a surge in retractions,affecting scientific integrity and attracting extensive attention from various stakeholders.1,2 Countries,institutes,and journals are among the entities receiving special attention.3,4 However,our understanding of the actual prevalence of misconduct across disciplines and topics remains limited.Previous studies of academic misconduct have primarily focused on biomedical and life sciences,3 but have paid little attention to the broader scientific fields.

Two indicators rule them all:Mean and standard deviation used to calculate other journal indicators based on log-normal distribution of citation counts

Two journal-level indicators,respectively the mean(mi)and the standard deviation(vi)are proposed to be the core indicators of each journal and we show that quite several other indicators can be calculated from those two core indicators,assuming that yearly citation counts of papers in each journal follow more or less a log-normal distribution.Those other journal-level indicators include journal index,journal one-by-one-sample comparison citation success index S_(j)^(i),journal multiple-sample K^(i)-K^(j) comparison success rate S_(j,k^(j)^(i,k^(i))),and minimum representative sizes k_(j)^(i) and k_(i)^(j),the average ranking of all papers in a journal in a set of journals(R^(t)).We find that those indicators are consistent with those calculated directly using the raw citation data({C^(i)=(c_(1)^(i),c_(2)^(j),...c_(N)^(i),■i})of journals.In addition to its theoretical significance,the ability to estimate other indicators from core indicators has practical implications.This feature enables individuals who lack access to raw citation count data to utilize other indicators by simply using core indicators,which are typically easily accessible.

Identification of milestone papers in physics via reference publication year spectroscopy

In the modern time of the high speed development of physics,the citation analysis facilitates us to trace the brilliant ideas and works in the past.Here we use the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy(RPYS)to identify the historical roots that announce significant discoveries in physics and compare them with the milestone papers selected by physicists.Among the 123 milestones,64 milestone papers are successfully identified by RPYS.Some papers are identified simultaneously in multiple subfields,implying their broad impact across the fields of physics.The RPYS analysis shows promise in detecting the historical roots and identifying fundamental papers.There are still some open questions that need to be investigated.