FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2088492056> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2088492056 endingPage "626" @default.
• W2088492056 startingPage "625" @default.
• W2088492056 abstract "Publications in peer-reviewed journals are the currency for academic careers. They are probably the most important factor determining whether a young researcher gets a post-doctoral research position or lectureship (assistant professorship in other countries), whether an assistant professor gets tenure and promotion and whether grants are won. For the more senior academic, they again play an important role in promotion and can be used to determine your standing in the research community.1 Senior academics may also be under pressure from their PhD students and junior colleagues within their team to publish as much as possible to further their co-workers fledgling careers. Academia remains a Publish or Perish world. It is therefore not surprising that some academics submit papers to journals that could be described as the Smallest (or ‘least’ or ‘minimum’) Publishable Unit or SPU. This is defined as the minimum amount of information that can generate a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Wikipedia suggests that “the term is often used as a joking, ironic, or sometimes derogatory reference to the strategy of pursuing the greatest quantity of publications at the expense of their quality”. The increasing number of journals, decrease in size of papers and increase in the number of co-authors2 suggest that this is widespread. Indeed, nobody is immune to these pressures, myself included. In fact, some researchers go further and publish essentially the same work more than once. A review of 22,433 papers published in ophthalmology journals between 1997 and 2000 suggested that 1.39% (or 311) were redundant, in that they presented essentially the same information as a previously published paper.3 An example of the SPU that appears to becoming more common is “Salami Slicing”.4, 5 This is the process of reporting the results of one research study in several papers. A simple example would be a study that compared the quality of three lenses (A v B v C) and then published the results of A v B in one paper and B v C in another. Is this a useful approach? It certainly will boost a young researcher's CV in terms of the number of papers they have co-authored. What are the downsides? The negative aspects of salami slicing include that the research literature is distorted if readers believe they came from a different subject sample.4 In systematic reviews and meta-analyses6 some data could be over-represented. For example, if the paper that presented data from lens A v B and the other paper that presented data from lens B v C were both included in a meta-analysis,6 the data from lens B could be included twice and distort the findings. In some cases, these papers do not provide a full description of their methodology and only indicate that lens A v B was assessed or lens B v C. This means that the complete methods are not available to the editor, reviewer or reader. A study of lens A v B is not the same as a study of A v B v C: Could there be some interaction effects? Learning effects? Fatigue effects? What was the order of measurements of the various assessments for A v B v C? We do not know. The repetition also wastes readers' time, as well as those of reviewers and editors.4 From this perspective, it is something that journals need to be aware of and attempt to prevent publication. In this respect, we used to rely on reviewers to highlight these issues if they were aware of them, but that is clearly an ineffective procedure.3 Recently, our publishers Wiley, have provided us with access to plagiarism software, iThenticate, which is very useful for spotting potential salami-slicing as well as plagiarism or redundancy.2 Any paper that has more than 30% replicated from another paper suggests it should be looked at more carefully. Mojon-Azzi and Mojon suggest that salami slicing is a form of scientific misconduct.5 However, of the seven ‘salami-sliced’ papers that I have overseen as editor in the last year or so, the submissions have always cited the previous studies (lets say the submission presented data of lens B v C and they cited the paper that published data of lens A v B). This suggests there is no intentional deceit taking place, just an assumption that this practice is perfectly acceptable. Of course, the first paper in a salami-sliced production can be very difficult to spot if the authors do not describe the full methodology of the study that the data have been taken from. The other reason why researchers should not submit salami-sliced papers is that they are probably not in their best interests. First, they could damage the author's reputation. Second, judgements of academic staff for appointment, tenure and promotion seem nowadays to be based on the quality of publications rather than the quantity.7 As an example of this change in emphasis, the quality of the research of Departments and Schools in UK Universities is assessed on a ~ 5-yearly cycle in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE, or Research Excellence Framework or REF as it has been renamed for 2014). This is used to determine Government funding of research in subsequent years, provide accountability for public investment in research and “establishes reputational yardsticks.” In 1992, the RAE included an assessment of the quantity of publications from researchers. However, since then all RAEs have concentrated on ‘quality’; not asking for quantity information and only requesting the submission of approximately four publications from individual researchers over a 5-year period.8 Similarly, the importance of the h-index and its variants as an indicator of publication records has grown over the last 10 years or so and appears to be an important assessment in academic promotions.7 The h-index is the number of papers N that have more than or equal to N citations, so that a researcher with 30 papers which all have more than 30 citations has a h-index of 30. The h-index is more an indicator of ‘quality’ (or at least citations) than ‘quantity’. Note that a huge list of 100 publications that each receive 2 citations provides a low h-index of 2. As a further example, Efron & Brennan recently used the numerous variations of the h-index to compare the research output of all the leading Australian optometry researchers.1 The number of their publications was not mentioned. When the contact lens literature was similarly assessed,9 although authors and journals were ranked on the basis of the number of papers, these were the number of papers that were included in their list of the 1000 most cited contact lens articles. Again, an analysis of citations/quality rather than quantity per se.9 How does this apply to salami slicing? A paper that included all the results of a study (e.g. lens A v B v C in the example) would likely have been able to attain publication in a higher quality journal (however that is determined) and would be of higher quality. It is highly likely that the full publication would receive more downloads and citations than any ‘split’ publications, so that it is much more likely to contribute to a researcher's h-index. Young researchers need to be aware of these changes. Publish or Perish remains true, but publishing a smaller number of quality papers seems much more likely to be advantageous to both the research literature and the young researcher than publishing SPUs, salami slicing and a long list of little cited papers. On another topic entirely… A recently published paper in Ophthalmology listed the publication times of the vast majority of ophthalmology and optometry journals.10 These data are somewhat old and were calculated from publications in 2010. OPO was ranked relatively low at 33rd of 41 journals with a median time from submission of the paper to publication of 360 days or about 1 year. Most authors want their research published as quickly as possible and readers like to read the very latest research, so that a quick publication time is preferred. Of course, there needs to be a balance because a fair, but rigorous review process (without asking too much of reviewers)11 and then an accurate production process that provides adequate time for proofing by the editorial staff and authors is required. I have repeated the calculations of Chen and colleagues (the median time from submission to online publication for the first two papers –not including editorials or review papers - in each issue of a volume)10 for OPO volumes 2011 and 2012 and am pleased to say that our median times to publication were 203 days (inter-quartile range, IQR of 174 to 238 days) in 2011 and 170 (IQR 137 to 193) days in 2012. This would have ranked us about 8th of the 41 journals, with a median time to publication of less than 6 months. For this substantial improvement I would like to thank our feature issue editors, associate editors and reviewers (for providing reviews in the requested 3-week period11) and our publishers Wiley for dramatically decreasing the time it takes from the decision letter to authors to the publication of the paper online." @default.
• W2088492056 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2088492056 creator A5039024393 @default.
• W2088492056 date "2013-10-11" @default.
• W2088492056 modified "2023-10-02" @default.
• W2088492056 title "Salami slicing and the SPU: Publish or Perish?" @default.
• W2088492056 cites W1587675409 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W1601695708 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W1750844002 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W1945965754 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W1966117675 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W2020389884 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W2043609668 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W2060786516 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W2318358952 @default.
• W2088492056 cites W26436872 @default.
• W2088492056 doi "https://doi.org/10.1111/opo.12090" @default.
• W2088492056 hasPubMedId "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24118035" @default.
• W2088492056 hasPublicationYear "2013" @default.
• W2088492056 type Work @default.
• W2088492056 sameAs 2088492056 @default.
• W2088492056 citedByCount "15" @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562014 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562015 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562016 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562017 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562018 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562019 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562020 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562022 @default.
• W2088492056 countsByYear W20884920562023 @default.
• W2088492056 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2088492056 hasAuthorship W2088492056A5039024393 @default.
• W2088492056 hasBestOaLocation W20884920561 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C136764020 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C151719136 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C2776190703 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C2780460463 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C124952713 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C136764020 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C142362112 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C151719136 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C2776190703 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C2780460463 @default.
• W2088492056 hasConceptScore W2088492056C41008148 @default.
• W2088492056 hasIssue "6" @default.
• W2088492056 hasLocation W20884920561 @default.
• W2088492056 hasLocation W20884920562 @default.
• W2088492056 hasOpenAccess W2088492056 @default.
• W2088492056 hasPrimaryLocation W20884920561 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W1982987470 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2354217160 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2354354754 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2390327539 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2765179615 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2782307484 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2792567669 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W2889682137 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W3047780056 @default.
• W2088492056 hasRelatedWork W3206494224 @default.
• W2088492056 hasVolume "33" @default.
• W2088492056 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2088492056 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2088492056 magId "2088492056" @default.
• W2088492056 workType "article" @default.