Guidelines for Editing Biomedical Journals: Recommended by Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina

On the Occasion of Marking 30 Years of Editorial Work with the Journals "Medical Archives" and "Acta Informatica Medica"

Collapse

Medical Archives/Medicinski Arhiv/Archives de Medicine is Finally Indexed in SCOPUS Database

Collapse

Operation of Medical Journal Citation Databases Without Control. Dilemma: Are They What They Want to Be in the Eyes of Scientific Community

The decision of the citation database to include or not include a journal is not subject to the control of another entity, or the professional public, and there are no internationally established ethical standards that the citation database would have to apply. As a consequence of the absence of control, the already mentioned offensive reviews and arbitrary interpretation of the criteria for journal inclusion appear. Given that a journal's entry into the citation database is a condition for its long-term survival, people who make decisions in the citation databases gain the power to shut down or revive certain journals based on personal preferences. Any power that is not controlled is eventually abused. Therefore, our proposal is to urgently establish the principles of ethical behavior of citation databases at the global level and find ways to ensure compliance with such principles.

On the Occasion of the Symposium "Scientometry, Citation, Plagiarism and Predatory in Scientific Publishing", Sarajevo, 2021

12th Days of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina (AMNuBiH) this year were organized together with the International Academy of Sciences and Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo on December 4, 2021. The title of the symposium was "Scientometry, Citation, Plagiarism and Predatory in Scientific Publishing". Experiences in the scientific area covered by title of this conference were presented by some of the most influential scientists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who are included between 2% of authors in the Stanford scientometric list, which was published in October 2021 in the journal Biology Plos. Some of the authors are former or current Editors-in-Chiefs of indexed biomedical journals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia (Izet Masic, Asim Kurjak, Doncho Donev, Osman Sinanovic). Also, Sylwia Ufnalska and Izet Masic are or were members of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and they have great experiences about the topic of this conference. Science that analyzes scientific papers and their citation in the scientific journals - called scientometrics - day by day has become important for measuring scientific validity and quality of all kinds of publications deposited in the most important on-line scientific databases, like WoS, Scopus, Medline, PubMed Central, Embase, Hinari, etc., but also in academic platforms ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Scientometrics use the Impact and Echo factor for measuring the quality of publications in WoS journals, Scopus uses the h-Index, and the most common one used in the last 10 years is Google Scholar index. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, and also positive and negative influences in the academic praxis. One of the greatest, and sadly too common, problems which participants in the academic process encountered are plagiarism and predatory publishing. In order to prevent this severest form of academic fraud, authors must give credit to someone whose work has helped him/her by citing references correctly. This presentations of the symposium "SWEP 2021") analyzed the major components of scientometrics, the basic mechanisms of citations in medical publications and plagiarism, as an opposition to the primary goal of scientific enterprise: search for truth.

Inflated Co-authorship Introduces Bias to Current Scientometric Indices

BACKGROUND

Although scientometry gradually became prevalent way of measuring one's research output, there are many inherent drawbacks in main indices that are used: impact factor, number of citations, number of published papers and Hirsch's index.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to analyze effects of inflated co-authorship on values of scientometric indices among authors in biomedicine who participated in published papers with more than 30 co-authors.

METHODS

The study was of cross-sectional type, based on 100 publications randomly extracted from the MEDLINE database. The inclusion criterion was publication with more than 30 authors. The studies with topics not related to humans were excluded from further analysis.

RESULTS

On average about 10% of papers published by the surveyed authors had more than 30 co-authors, but these papers brought more than 40% of all citations and more than 40% of Hirsch's index attributed to these authors. The duration of scientific activity was well correlated to number of citations, Hirsch's index and the number of publications themselves with 30 or less co-authors, while the correlation did not exist with number of citations, Hirsch's index and the number of publications with more than 30 authors. In summary, publications with > 30 authors carry more scientometric points than publications with less co-authors, and the researchers with shorter scientific activity had larger scientometric benefit from publications with more than 30 authors than senior researchers.

CONCLUSION

Unjustified and prolific co-authorship is one of methods for inflation of scientometric indices that are not further reflecting true quality of research output of an individual. Further improvement of scientometric indicators may prevent unjustified co-authorship if it reflects the work invested in a research result.