Category: Journals

Retraction Watch

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December 6, 2024

2:54 pm

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Journals, News & Events, Research, Uncategorized

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by Judy Farrar

One tool in the effort to highlight the fake paper crisis, is the non-profit Retraction Watch blog and database of retracted scientific papers. According to their blog, after they launched the website in 2010, the database listed about 200 papers.  Each year has seen an increase and as of now the database contains over 50,000 entries.  In September 2023 the Retraction Watch dataset was purchased by Crossref, an organization that assigns digital object identifiers, and was made a public resource with secure funding. Search the database at https://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx

The Retraction Watch blog features topics such as the “The top 10 most highly cited retracted papers,” and “Retracted coronavirus (COVID-19) papers,” which currently lists over 450 retracted publications, and “Papers and peer reviews with evidence of ChatGPT writing.”  A recent feature is the Hijacked Journal tracker, a spreadsheet identifying hijacked journal domains based on an analysis of the archives of clone journals: https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-hijacked-journal-checker

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Photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash

In the News: The Fake Paper Crisis

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November 12, 2024

9:28 pm

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by Megan Fletcher

The recent surge in academic research papers being retracted or corrected due to issues like faulty data, scientific misconduct, and outright fraud is a significant threat to the credibility of academic publishing and the broader academic community. The rise of artificial intelligence has exacerbated this problem, making it more difficult for academic publishers and researchers to manage.

To address this issue, it is imperative for academic publishers, researchers, and institutions to work together to implement stricter quality control measures and promote ethical research practices. This could involve investing in advanced tools for detecting plagiarism and fraud, strengthening peer review processes, and fostering a culture of transparency and accountability within the academic community.

Various news outlets, including the New York Times and The Guardian, have covered this topic. If you’re interested check out the recent articles below:

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Open Access Week Feature: A UMD Collaboration in an OA Journal

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October 24, 2024

4:09 pm

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Cross-posted from the Claire T. Carney Library Blog

International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize free and accessible research and scholarship and to inspire scholars to engage in the advantageous OA model in publishing. The term Open Access refers to scholarly material that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Today we will highlight a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who has published along with a UMass Dartmouth student under a Creative Commons license in an Open Access journal.

Nicholas Zambrotta is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Psychology department whose research interests include morality, political polarization, and social support and health related behaviors. In early 2024 Zambrotta published an article called “Attitude Changes Among College Students Post-Pandemic” with Alex Goncalo who was working on his BS in Finance. Goncalo has since earned his MS, and has gone on to pursue his PhD in Finance at the University of South Florida. Their study “measured happiness, optimism, and psychological well-being in a sample of 182 college students via an electronic Qualtrics questionnaire to identify predictors of state optimism and examine potential differences in these variables between class rankings.” The results of their survey and analysis can be read and shared (with attribution) by any researcher thanks to the OA model of their selected publication, Modern Psychological Studies.

The journal is managed by undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and not only is it student-led, but Modern Psychological Studies focuses on publishing quality articles by undergraduate students. Regarding the review process, Goncalo says, “Their rigorous review process was enlightening, which contributed greatly to this undeniably invaluable experience.” Authors who choose to publish with MPS actually retain their copyright under a Non-Exclusive Distribution License. This arrangement protects freedoms of the authors, while the Creative Commons licenses applied to each article ensure that all researchers can benefit from the work. 

Kudos to Zambrotta and Goncalo on their OA publication! 

Image by Nick Shockey, licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_symbol.png

 

Paper Retraction: The Process and Why It Happens

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October 16, 2024

2:41 pm

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Faculty Publications, Journals, Research

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by Sara Pike

This year, our committee will look at the sham and retracted paper crisis in more depth and share information with the community through this blog. We will begin by providing an overview and information about paper retraction, which is the flagging of a published work in a journal due to a serious issue like data falsification or major errors in the research that are discovered after the publication process is complete.

Discussion in academic circles and in the news about research integrity, paper retractions and falsified research continues to be a major topic and a major source of concern for academia and society at large, as examples of recent articles attest.

“1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’” https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/24/1-in-7-scientific-papers-is-fake-suggests-study-that-author-calls-wildly-nonsystematic/

“Whistleblowers flagged 300 scientific papers for retraction. Many journals ghosted them” https://www.science.org/content/article/whistleblowers-flagged-300-scientific-papers-for-retraction-many-journals-ghosted-them

Paper retraction goes beyond the correction of mistakes in published papers, and should be considered by either the author(s) or an editorial board if there are ethical concerns related to plagiarism, peer review, unreliable data, unauthorized use of data, copyright infringement, conflicts of interest and the like. https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines

COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics, provides this and much more information, including formal guidelines for paper retraction that many publishers rely on. If authors become aware of relevant issues with their work, they are strongly encouraged to explore self-retraction of papers by contacting the editorial board of the publication in question. In the months ahead we will explore topics related to paper mills and falsification of research articles as we seek to support scholars and their work.

Research and Publishing Roundup

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August 14, 2024

2:46 pm

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Kudos to the following members of the UMass Dartmouth community on their research and publishing accomplishments:

Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Iren Valova participated in a panel on artificial intelligence at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Conversation series. Valova joined Dell Technologies and TD Bank officials to discuss how artificial intelligence is changing the business landscape across industries and sectors of the economy.

Professor Avijit Gangopadhyay (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) co-authored “On the evidence of helico‑spiralling recirculation within coherent cores of eddies using Lagrangian approach” in Nature’s Scientific Reports. The article aims to advance comprehension of coherent eddies’ structural characteristics and their internal dynamics.

Professor Geoff McDonald (Law) was interviewed for an article about post-foreclosure evictions. Based on his research, McDonald focuses on technical bankruptcy questions and the moral basis of bankruptcy, including the interrelated issues of debt, justice, and forgiveness.

Professor Brian Williams (History) authored an article in The Conversation on Ukraine’s defeat of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet due to their superior weapons and naval tactics.

Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) published “Using the Legal Concept of Fault Attribution to Analyze the Effectiveness of Coastal Climate Change Adaptation in the United States” in The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Policy and Law. The article introduces the legal concept of fault attribution as a framework for assessing the effectiveness of current national coastal climate change policies.

Professor Kenneth Manning (Political Science) discussed the intricacies and “luck” involved in the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding presidential immunity and the impact on former President Trump.

Executive Director of Economic Development and Community Partnerships Michael Goodman was featured in the Summer 2024 issue of MassBenchmarks with his highlight titled “State of the State Economy.” The chapter discusses the Massachusetts economy’s slowing in the face of continued inflation, high interest rates, and slight downtrends in job growth.

Ethan Moyer (’25) was featured in an article for his artistic contribution to the Envision Resilience Mural Project in New Bedford. Moyer’s graphic will be turned into a mural that serves as a visual reminder of the impact of climate change

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff with your request: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

Research and Publishing Roundup

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June 24, 2024

3:34 pm

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Faculty Publications, Journals, library services, News & Events

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Here is some of the most recent news in research and publishing on campus:

Professor Liudong Xing (Electrical & Computer Engineering) recently published Reliability and Resilience in the Internet of Things. The book provides state-of-the-art coverage on IoT reliability and resilience modeling, analysis, design methods, and solutions to help prevent costly malfunctions.

Associate Professor Lucas Mann (English & Communication) published an excerpt of his forthcoming book, Attachments, in Esquire.

Associate Professor Eric Larson (Crime & Justice Studies) recently published Grounding Global Justice: Race, Class, and Grassroots Globalism in the U.S. and Mexico. The book offers a transnational history of the emergence of the global justice movement in the United States and Mexico and considers how popular organizations laid the foundations for this “movement of movements.”

Physics alumni Vrutant Mehta (M.S., ’23), Jack Sullivan (B.S., ’23), Khanak Bhargava (M.S., ’21), Sudarshan Neopane (M.S., ’21) and Professor Robert Fisher (Physics) had their paper “Hydrodynamical Simulations Favor a Pure Deflagration Origin of the Near-Chandrasekhar Mass Supernova Remnant 3C 397” covered by Astrobites. In this work, the UMassD group, collaborating with space scientists from Japan, seeks to understand new data on the remnants of a stellar explosion gathered by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory.

Assistant Research Professor Adam Delargy (Fisheries Oceanography) recently co-published “Catch yield and selectivity of a modified scallop dredge to reduce seabed impact,” in PLoS ONE. The article details the need for technical gear innovations in scallop dredging and further improvements for more eco-friendly fishery approaches.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

DOIs at UMass Dartmouth

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April 30, 2024

6:01 pm

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By Matt Sylvain

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are an important and ubiquitous part of online scholarly communication. They help provide persistent linking through the use of unique alphanumeric strings. You’ll see them assigned to a variety of scholarly material, including journal articles, dissertations/theses, and conference proceedings. They appear in bibliographies and journal websites and are a required component of modern citations. For example, this page addresses when to include digital object identifiers (DOIs) and uniform resource locators (URLs) in APA Style references.

The benefit of DOIs to authors, researchers, and publishers is their reliability. URLs can change, while DOIs are static and a more reliable way to ensure that research traffic gets to its intended destination.

You may have noticed that DOIs follow a common syntax and all look very similar. They contain a prefix that begins with “10.” followed by the publisher’s identifier. So, a publisher’s DOI prefix is always the same and can be used to determine whether two DOIs are for works by the same publisher. For example, UMass Dartmouth’s prefix is 10.62791. All DOIs published by the University will begin with this number.

DOIs also contains a suffix, which are opaque strings created by the publisher. The prefix and suffix are often preceded by a DOI resolver. Here’s an example from the CrossRef website:

Until now, the library has helped researchers and scholars understand and use DOIs, but it has not created the identifiers. To do so, the library needed to join a registration agency. Agencies provide the oversight necessary to ensure a functioning system. For example, I can imagine publishers accidently reusing DOIs, duplicating an existing DOI, and not using a consistent prefix if agencies didn’t exist. This spring, the library joined CrossRef, a non-profit used by many universities to mint DOIs for their scholarly publications. This summer we hope to begin assigning DOIs to articles in Tagus Press’s Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed journal which is published semi-annually at UMass Dartmouth. We will eventually  expand  the identifiers to the University’s electronic theses and dissertations.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at libsys@umassd.edu.

Enhance Your Academic Writing with Citation Tools

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April 19, 2024

2:33 pm

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by Kari Mofford

While it would be nice if all the academic leaders in APA, MLA, Chicago…etc. could all get together and create one citation style to rule them all…it probably won’t happen soon.  In the meantime, we do have tools to help us figure out these styles.  While citation generators like Citation Machine are great, they should be checked for accuracy, as it’s not unheard of for them to have typos, issues with capitalization, or other mistakes.  They are just pulling information from fields and their data is only as good as what they harvest.  Check out our Libguide for some good sources on many of the styles.

Another tool that can be very helpful is a Citation Management system. This is a great thing to have if you are gathering multiple citations for your thesis, dissertation, research paper, etc.  Here at the Claire T. Carney Library we support Zotero, which is free!  We have a Libguide on how to download it onto your laptop and lots of information to set up your account.  It makes it very easy to capture your citations, organize them, and create in-text citations and bibliographies.  Like citation generators, you should still double check the citations after they are in Zotero for accuracy, but it’s a great product and invaluable for projects requiring the gathering of many, many citations.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to your librarian to ask for assistance with any citation questions!

 

Research and Publishing Roundup

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March 19, 2024

12:44 pm

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Faculty Publications, Journals, News & Events, Research

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Here is the latest news in UMD faculty, staff, and community publishing and research:

Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) was featured in an article that detailed the impact of rising seas on the SouthCoast and mitigation strategies already in place. McGuire was also featured in an article about the changes in policy impacting coastal decision-making due to climate-induced sea level rise.Assistant Professor Peeranuch LeSeure (Nursing) was featured in the International Family Association’s newsletter, highlighting her research on improving self-care management for diabetic patients among the Portuguese population in Massachusetts. LeSeure is developing a mobile app tailored to this population’s cultural needs and values to support self-care management.Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) was featured in a Newsweek article about his research on the number of missing indigenous women in the U.S. and how it relates to the story told in the recently released film Killers of the Flower Moon.Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Kimberly Scott and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Career & Civic Engagement Matt Roy were interviewed on the Chamber of Commerce’s Education Spotlight. The episode focused on UMass Dartmouth’s commitment to students and community.

Professor Brian Glyn Williams (History) was featured in an article that analyzed the many conflicts currently occurring across the globe and the implications of varying levels of U.S. support.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

Research and Publishing Roundup

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January 19, 2024

3:38 pm

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Here is the latest news in UMD faculty, staff, and community publishing and research:

The Women’s and Gender Studies Department and the University of Rhode Island co-published the fall 2023 issue of the Journal of Feminist Scholarship titled “Translating Transnational Feminisms.” The issue, co-edited by Associate Professor Erin Krafft (Crime & Justice Studies) and Caroline De Souza (’22), argues for the integral position of feminist translation practices and the theories of Feminist Translation Studies as tools for both local and transnational feminist solidarities.Professor Avijit Gangopadhyay (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) co-published “Recent changes in the upper oceanic water masses over the Indian Ocean using Argo data” in Scientific Reports. The article quantifies different contributions of pure warming and pure freshening processes on the long-term thermohaline changes observed in the Argo era (2003-2019).Professor Brian Williams (History) wrote an article in The Conversation discussing the differences and similarities between ISIS and Hamas by comparing each group’s beliefs and tactics.Assistant Professor Jonathan Kush’s (Management & Marketing) paper “Communication networks and team performance: selecting members to network positions” was adapted into a radio program as part of NSF’s The Discovery Files. The paper examined how individuals come to occupy communication network positions and the effect of selection processes on group performance.Emeritus Professor Fahri Karakaya (Management & Marketing) co-published “Cross Cultural Analysis of Facebook on Global Purchase” in the Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness. The article examines the impact of brand influencers, brand generated content, and brand engagement on culture.Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Economic Development and Strategic Initiatives Michael Goodman co-published a report that analyzed offshore wind companies’ impact on the SouthCoast economy and workforce. The first two years of construction on wind turbines employed nearly 2,000 Massachusetts residents.Associate Professor Robert Darst (Political Science), Associate Professor Gavin Fay (Fisheries Oceanography), and Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Iren Valova co-published “Climate Resilience in Coastal Massachusetts: A Survey of Municipal Challenges, Plans, and Needs” in MassBenchmarks Journal . The piece details the efforts of the Northeast Center for Coastal Resilience, a collaboration across the UMass system, which conducted a survey on coastal resilience in Massachusetts municipalities and produced a comprehensive report on climate-change hazards, resilience strategies, and barriers.Emeritus Professor Fahri Karakaya (Marketing) co-published a chapter titled “Demographics on the use and Importance of nutrition Labels” in Advances in Health Sciences. The chapter examines the research literature on the impact of governmental programs and other food label initiatives.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/