Hello fellow journalologists,
This week’s issue of the newsletter is packed full of scholarly publishing goodness. You’ll learn about two new editorial benchmarking surveys, a report on data sharing, changes to the way Scopus selects journals for inclusion, and much more. Enjoy!
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News
Clarivate and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) released 2024 Research Fronts™, identifying the most dynamic and rapidly growing specialties in sciences and social sciences. This marks the eleventh annual collaboration between the two organizations.
The report identifies 125 Research Fronts, comprising 110 ‘hot’ Fronts and 15 ‘emerging’ Fronts. A hot Research Front represents an active area of study, while an emerging Research Front indicates a rapidly developing field in scientific research. The ability to identify these specialty areas of research provides a distinct advantage for those who seek to monitor, support and advance research, often in the face of finite resources. This includes governments, policymakers, publishers, research administrators and companies.
Clarivate (press release)
JB: If you have a broad interest in research and want to better understand which topics are trending, then read this report. You’ll need to provide your contact details to download it.
You may want to read this paper in Nature Human Behaviour beforehand though:
Market bubbles emerge when asset prices are driven unsustainably higher than asset values, and shifts in belief burst them. We demonstrate an analogous phenomenon in the case of biomedical knowledge, when promising research receives inflated attention. We introduce a diffusion index that quantifies whether research areas have been amplified within social and scientific bubbles, or have diffused and become evaluated more broadly. We illustrate the utility of our diffusion approach in tracking the trajectories of cardiac stem cell research (a bubble that collapsed) and cancer immunotherapy (which showed sustained growth).
The great Saudi university farce is coming to an end. The number of highly cited scientists who claim to work in Saudi Arabia has plummeted by 76% since April last year, when EL PAÍS revealed the existence of a scheme in which foreign researchers were being paid up to €70,000 (nearly $74,000) a year to lie about their place of employment, in order to artificially pump up Saudi institutions in international academic rankings. The chemist Damià Barceló, for example, falsely declared from 2016 to 2022 that his primary affiliation was King Saud University in Riyadh, when in reality he was the director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research in Girona, in northeastern Spain.
EL PAÍS English (Manuel Asende)
By combining three different data sources; Dimensions, Springer Nature Data Availability Statements (DAS) and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-funded Data Citation corpus (CZI DCC), we reveal linkages between peer reviewed published research and data sets being made available. We believe this jump from understanding what people say they are going to do to actively showing what they are doing, is an important step in driving change and understanding how to bridge the gap between policy and practice in open data sharing.
Digital Science (announcement)
JB: You can download the report here. You may want to attend the webinar on Jan 23.
To maintain our high-quality standards, at Scopus, we ensure that changes to the source (journal) are carefully monitored and validated. The authenticity of source changes are verified before any updates are made. Source changes can include, but are not limited to, changes to the title name, ISSN, ownership, or Editorial oversight of the journal. It is therefore not guaranteed that a journal will remain selected for Scopus coverage after the change, and this is subject to continued discretional review by the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory board (CSAB). Journals that have undergone significant change will be considered a new journal and may be submitted for Scopus review again according to the regular title review process.
To come to a decision to accept or reject a title for Scopus, Elsevier follows the independent advice from the CSAB. However, Elsevier in consultation with the CSAB reserves the right to change decisions, adjust the selection criteria, halt, remove, or re-evaluate titles that are accepted for Scopus without prior notice.
Elsevier Scopus Blog
JB: The other interesting part of this announcement was “Removing 2 year conditions for newly launched journals”.
But a somewhat unexpected way that this impacted me was that it felt very icky. As academics we’re held to a high ethical standard and science can be extremely competitive. And all of a sudden, one of my peers, who I haven’t met, is allegedly faking reviews for papers, and looking at their track record, they are extremely prolific. Honestly, I felt cheated and I felt it was important to share my story to, hopefully, reduce the chance of this happening again.
What has also surprised me is that many people I have talked to, all the way from junior to very experienced academics, had never heard of fake reviews or even suspected that it might happen, and certainly not at this scale. So, I feel it is important to get the message out that there are chinks in the armor of the submission and peer-review process. Of course, the fact that this case has been uncovered by Elsevier’s ethics team does not mean that such cases are isolated to their journals.
Science (Martin Enserink)
JB: Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) is one of the journals that’s recently been put ’on hold’ by Web of Science.
Retraction Watch covered a similar case this week: Wiley medical journal retracts dozens of papers for manipulated peer review, with more to come.
International Wound Journal, a Wiley title, has retracted 27 papers since June with notices mentioning “manipulated” or “compromised” peer review.
“A comprehensive investigation examining manipulated peer review in this journal is in progress,” a Wiley spokesperson told Retraction Watch. The publisher anticipates retracting more articles as the investigation continues.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Compensation and Benefits Benchmarking Study! This annual global study will gather comprehensive data on wages, compensation, benefits, policies, and skills from professionals in scholarly communications and the organizations that employ them. The survey results will be hosted on SSP’s new Insights Platform.
The study includes two distinct surveys: one for individuals and one for organizations. Data collection is open now through March 31, 2025, with reports available beginning February 2025. Participants are encouraged to submit their surveys by December 31, 2024, to ensure timely findings that can guide decisions in the coming year.
Society for Scholarly Publishing (press release)
JB: Individuals and institutions will receive an executive summary of the aggregate data at no cost (if they complete at least 60% of the questions), but will need to pay a subscription to dive deep into the data. It’s not clear from the announcement what the price will be. The more people that participate, the richer the data source will be so it might be worth filling in the survey (here).
For years, journal publishers have struggled to make informed editor compensation decisions, often relying on history and best guesses in the absence of dependable data. This study offers actionable benchmarks based on journal size, subject matter, editorial responsibilities, and more. The insights enable publishers to foster equitable practices, attract top-tier talent, and strengthen their editorial teams.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd
JB: You hang around for ages waiting for a benchmarking report and then two arrive at the same time. If you don’t want to wait for the SSP report to drop, here’s another option:
Nature’s survey — which took place before the US election in November — together with more than 20 interviews, revealed where some of the biggest obstacles to providing science advice lie. Eighty per cent of respondents thought policymakers lack sufficient understanding of science — but 73% said that researchers don’t understand how policy works. “It’s a constant tension between the scientifically illiterate and the politically clueless,” says Paul Dufour, a policy specialist at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Nature (Helen Pearson)
JB: Now that’s a good quote. Presumably most journal editors, like their academic colleagues, don’t understand how policy works either. Should journals have a role in translating research papers into actionable advice? What can journal editors do to help? Nature Energy experimented with an article type called Policy Brief (free to read here), which are time consuming to produce. We talk a lot about the SDGs within our community, but are we helping policymakers enough? The accompanying editorial is worth reading, too.
Other news stories
Altmetric adds Bluesky social media as a research attention source
India takes out giant nationwide subscription to 13,000 journals
Clarivate's Commitment to Enhancing Metadata Accuracy
Sage first to adopt Dimensions Author Check, a new research integrity tool from Digital Science
EDP Sciences Takes Decisive Action to Safeguard Scientific Integrity in Conference Proceedings
PageMajik and Newgen KnowledgeWorks Announce Strategic Collaboration to Enhance Publishing Technology Services
Crossref suspends company’s membership after Retraction Watch report
Revising OASPA’s recommended practices - what we changed, and why
Celebrating DataCite's 15th Anniversary: Expanding Our Reach and Impact
SCI launches unique industry-integrated open access journal to address the challenges of Sustainability JB: My fascination with branding choices continues: “This is the first journal launching from a series of new journals under the SCI Innovate Open brand.”
The Future of Orthopedic Manuscript Submission - OrthoPubT by B&J and MC
Wiley Reports Second Quarter 2025 Results JB: This is the headline for the Research division: “Adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter was 31.3% compared to 31.6% in the prior year period”.
Knowledge Gate Group Wins the Fifth Annual Vesalius Innovation Award by Karger Publishers
Opinion
It is therefore welcome that the latest revision for the first time requires “meaningful engagement with potential and enrolled participants and their communities”. Research participants are no longer ‘subjects’ but experts: on their life, their health, their culture and their beliefs. Lived experience forms a vital trove of knowledge that should be respected and embraced. The Declaration now reflects best practice and existing frameworks, such as the San Code of Research Ethics and the TRUST Code for equitable research partnerships, which are bolstered by the Declaration. It is now for institutional review boards and research ethics committees, who are mandated to insist on “meaningful engagement”, to decide what this means in practice. They should require recruitment of a patient, public or community advisory board before the research has started, a commitment to co-design, and a willingness to change tack based on community feedback. Without a willingness to adjust proposed research, engagement is performative and not meaningful.
Nature Medicine (unsigned editorial)
JB: I’ve written in the past about how the word ’subject’ should be avoided in research papers. Our choice of words matter. This editorial is worth reading if you are involved in biomedical publishing. The bottom line is:
As journal editors, we can and should insist that inclusive health research is a prerequisite for publication. But by the time a paper lands on our desk, the research has already been done — equitably or not. The power of the Declaration lies in its impact far upstream in the research process, at the point of approval by research ethics committees. By incorporating the principles of inclusive health research, community engagement and global justice, the revised Declaration is a powerful tool to enact change.
A side effect is more pernicious. Once searching is facilitated, so is counting. Recent decades have seen a growth in measuring the output both of journals (impact factors) and of individuals (H-indices), based on citations from other academic outputs, and has been commercialized, with additional products such as Altmetrics based inter alia on social-media attention. The appearance of objectivity that is created once a quality is assigned a number can lead people to undervalue expert judgment, and many arguments have been made against using such indices for the purposes of recruitment or promotion. In my opinion, there is an even greater danger. It is not possible to measure a system without affecting its trajectory, as any student of quantum mechanics understands. And systematic measurement can create perverse incentives, to the extent that science can be driven to become attention-seeking rather than problem-solving.
Journal of Fluid Mechanics (M. Grae Worster)
JB: JFM is celebrating its 100th volume. Professor Worster was Editor-in-Chief from 2007 to 2021. This editorial looks back on how publishing has changed since 1981. I love reading reflective editorials like this one. I remember the first time I saw a web browser (in 1995) and I once edited with a pencil. We’ve come a long way in the past three decades.
The growing role of AI and technology enhances the peer review process, offering efficiency improvements through tools like automated plagiarism detection and reviewer selection. However, concerns about bias, data security, and the potential loss of the human element remain significant. Experts stress the need for human oversight, as AI cannot replace human reviewers’ critical thinking and ethical judgment. Open peer review and virtual platforms are acknowledged for their transparency but present challenges such as depersonalization and the risks to professional relationships. While these innovations offer benefits, their widespread adoption, particularly in high-impact journals, could be hindered by reputation and career advancement concerns.
Science Editor (Muhammad Sarwar et al)
Acquiring ScholarOne was a strategic investment. The “new Silverchair” will build on the strengths of the combined organization to create more robust, sustainable, and independent infrastructure for the publishing community. With the ScholarOne platform at the start of many publishers’ content workflows and the Silverchair Platform at the end, we’re now in a unique position to help publishers solve their submission, peer-review, research integrity, content workflow, content hosting, productization, and monetization challenges. We’ll do this by investing in our key platforms, by developing new features and services, and by enabling integrations or partnerships for our clients.
Silverchair (Will Schweitzer)
JB: If your journal uses ScholarOne you’ll want to read this.
Other opinion articles
Access to Science & Scholarship: An Interview with Amy Brand of MIT Press
What to cover during journal technical checks and how to optimize the process
Banish the PDF-hunting blues with these AI and digital tools
India's One Nation One Subscription deal enriches publishers and benefits few
Revising OASPA’s recommended practices - what we changed, and why
Open minds on open access—Exploring the benefits and drawbacks of emerging OA models
Making open research practice easier for researchers: Insights from protocols.io and the Francis Crick Insitute
MDPI INSIGHTS: The CEO’s Letter #18 – MDPI UK, Basel Job Fair, CETEF’24
A Paper Mill Target Reflects
Journal Club
Contrary to our null expectations, we found that the representation of the five main branches of knowledge, namely “Life Sciences & Biomedicine”, “Physical Sciences”, “Technology”, “Social Sciences”, and “Arts & Humanities” (in that order according to their number of publications), in multidisciplinary journals was not fully balanced nor, except for the period 1990–2009, proportional to the global research effort dedicated to each branch. Thus, multidisciplinary journals may be regarded as multidisciplinary insofar their scientific production covers several branches of knowledge, but not because they allocate a balanced or proportional number of publications among branches [6]. In particular, publications in multidisciplinary journals were strongly biased toward research areas where state-of-the-art research and paradigm-busting work are common.
PLOS ONE (Daniel Redondo-Gómez et al)
JB: I doubt many of you will be surprised to learn that journals that are included in the “Multidisciplinary Sciences” category in the Journal Citation Reports don’t cover all subject areas equally. This graph from the paper tells the story nicely. Subject areas that appear above the diagonal line are over-represented in multidisciplinary journals; topics that appear below the diagonal line are under-represented.
The graph below shows how subject coverage has changed between 1980 and 2021 in Nature and Science. If the dots move from red to green (left to right) then the journal published more papers over time in that subject area.
The striking uptrend in certain verbs during the last 2 years evidenced in our study potentially reflects a broader integration of GAI in the research publication process. The recurrent use of these specific verbs may not just be a stylistic choice but the evidence of AI assistance in academic writing. This trend raises important questions about the originality of research titles and the need for careful evaluation of GAI's expanding role in academic writing. As the academic community grapples with these developments, the establishment of standards and guidelines for AI's use in research communication becomes imperative to maintain the authenticity of scholarly output. The remarkable growth in the use of specific verbs identified as potentially AI-generated or GAI-assisted in manuscript titles from 2023 to 2024 suggests a profound AI influence on academic lexicon, a trend that has not been extensively documented in previous literature.
Learned Publishing (Ruben Comas-Forgas, Alexandros Koulouris, Dimitris Kouis)
This study mainly attempts to remedy the current lack of research about the spatial distribution of retracted articles by Chinese authors. Notably, there is a discernible spatial clustering among these retractions, with a gradual increase in the number of retracted articles from west to east. Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Henan, and An-hui are the hotspots for retractions. In view of this, the causes of retraction should be further analyzed for these highly aggregated areas within the context of each province in order to take more precise prevention and control measures.
PLOS ONE (Liping Shi et al)
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And finally...
Nature Portfolio is hiring Chief Editors for journals launching in January 2026. This job advert made me chuckle:
The Spanish market is important, but creating a journal just for men falls foul of all kinds of DEI policies, surely?
In case you’re wondering, the typo-corrected journal name is not Nature Seniors (that would overlap too much with Nature Aging), but Nature Sensors. This new journal will sit alongside titles such as Nature Electronics and Nature Biomedical Engineering, broadening the reach of the portfolio into the applied sciences.
The Nature publishers have launched three new Nature journals a year since 2015 (except for 2017 when we launched five); most of the Nature journals in the life and physical sciences were launched before 2015. The Nature portfolio strategy has been decades in the making. Brands are strengthened by new launches, if they are done well, not weakened.
Until next time,
James