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Introduction to Philosophy
Philosophy is the criticism of life. It enquires into the nature, meaning, purpose, origin,
and destiny of human life. It is the interpretation of life, its value, and meaning.
It is an enquiry into its source and destiny. It investigates the nature of the supreme
norms, ideals, or values of life. It investigates the relation of values to reality. In this
sense, philosophy is the interpretation of life.
1
Life and philosophy react upon each other. A superficial life of mere pursuit of sensual
pleasures and material comforts yields a superficial philosophy of materialism. A deeper
life of sense restraint, control of emotions and passions, and pursuit of human good,
truth, beauty, and the Holy yields a deeper philosophy of idealism.
(1) Epistemology;
(3) Axiology.
Axiology is the theory of values or ideals. Values are the supreme norms of life. Logic
investigates the nature of Truth. Ethics investigates the nature of Good. Aesthetics
investigates the nature of Beauty. Theology investigates the nature of the Holy. Axiology
enquires into the nature of intellectual, moral, esthetic, and religious values. It
investigates the relation of values to reality. It enquires into their subjectivity or
objectivity. It is a very important branch of contemporary philosophy. Tile problem of
values is in the forefront of recent philosophy.
2
Origin of Knowledge
Definitions of Knowledge
Sources of Knowledge
Types of Knowldege
4 Types of Knowledge
● Factual Knowledge. You can define factual knowledge simply as the terminologies,
specific details, and basic elements within any domain. ... This is the information that
can and must be learned through exposure, repetition, and commitment to memory.
● Conceptual Knowledge. can be understood as knowing the interrelationships and/or
functions among the details and elements that make up a larger structure. This
definition includes (1) knowing information classification and categorization, (2)
knowing principles and generalizations, and (3) knowing theories, models, and
structures.
● Procedural Knowledge. This knowledge type is critical for success in goal attainment
because it puts the “what” into action through the “how” process. Procedural knowledge
can be understood as knowledge of (1) subject-specific skills and algorithms, (2)
subject-specific techniques and methods, and (3) criteria for deciding when to use the
right procedures.
● Metacognitive Knowledge. can be understood as (1) strategic knowledge, (2)
knowledge about cognitive tasks (i.e. contextual, conditional), and (3) self-knowledge.
Because people are complex, and groups of people only add to the dynamic of
complexity within a system, having a good measure of metacognitive knowledge (that
is, engaging in this type of thinking) is critical to your performance, well-being, and
success.
Methods of Knowledge
What is Ethics in Research & Why is it Important? When most people think of ethics (or
morals), they think of rules for distinguishing between right and wrong. This is the most
common way of defining "ethics": norms for conduct that distinguish between
acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Most people learn ethical norms at home, at
school, in church, or in other social settings. Although most people acquire their sense
of right and wrong during childhood, moral development occurs throughout life and
human beings pass through different stages of growth as they mature. Ethical norms
are so omnipresent that one might be tempted to regard them as simple commonsense.
On the other hand, if morality were nothing more than commonsense, then why are
there so many ethical disputes and issues in our society? One plausible explanation of
these disagreements is that all people recognize some common ethical norms but
interpret, apply, and balance them in different ways in light of their own values and life
experiences. For example, two people could agree that murder is wrong but disagree
about the morality of abortion because they have different understandings of what it
means to be a human being. Most societies also have legal rules that govern behavior,
but ethical norms tend to be broader and more informal than laws. Although most
societies use laws to enforce widely accepted moral standards and ethical and legal
rules use similar concepts, ethics and law are not the same. An action may be legal but
unethical or illegal but ethical. We can also use ethical concepts and principles to
criticize, evaluate, propose, or interpret laws. Peaceful civil disobedience is an ethical
way of protesting laws or expressing political viewpoints. Another way of defining 'ethics'
focuses on the disciplines that study standards of conduct, such as philosophy,
theology, law, psychology, or sociology. For example, a "medical ethicist" is someone
who studies ethical standards in medicine. One may also define ethics as a method,
procedure, or perspective for deciding how to act and for analyzing complex problems
and issues. For instance, in considering a complex issue like global warming, one may
take an economic, ecological, political, or ethical perspective on the problem. While an
economist might examine the cost and benefits of various policies related to global
warming, an environmental ethicist could examine the ethical values and principles at
stake. Many different disciplines, institutions, and professions have standards for
behavior that suit their particular aims and goals. These standards also help members
of the discipline to coordinate their actions or activities and to establish the public's trust
of the discipline. For instance, ethical standards govern conduct in medicine, law,
engineering, and business. Ethical norms also serve the aims or goals of research and 5
apply to people who conduct scientific research or other scholarly or creative activities.
There is even a specialized discipline, research ethics, which studies these norms.
There are several reasons why it is important to adhere to ethical norms in research.
- First, norms promote the aims of research, such as knowledge, truth, and
avoidance of error. For example, prohibitions against fabricating, falsifying, or
misrepresenting research data promote the truth and minimize error.
- Second, since research often involves a great deal of cooperation and
coordination among many different people in different disciplines and
institutions, ethical standards promote the values that are essential to
collaborative work, such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, and fairness.
For example, many ethical norms in research, such as guidelines for
authorship, copyright and patenting policies, data sharing policies, and
confidentiality rules in peer review, are designed to protect intellectual
property interests while encouraging collaboration. Most researchers want to
receive credit for their contributions and do not want to have their ideas stolen
or disclosed prematurely.
- Third, many of the ethical norms help to ensure that researchers can be held
accountable to the public. For instance, federal policies on research
misconduct, conflicts of interest, the human subjects protections, and animal
care and use are necessary in order to make sure that researchers who are
funded by public money can be held accountable to the public.
- Fourth, ethical norms in research also help to build public support for
research. People are more likely to fund a research project if they can trust
the quality and integrity of research.
- Finally, many of the norms of research promote a variety of other important
moral and social values, such as social responsibility, human rights, animal
welfare, compliance with the law, and public health and safety. Ethical lapses
in research can significantly harm human and animal subjects, students, and
the public. For example, a researcher who fabricates data in a clinical trial
may harm or even kill patients, and a researcher who fails to abide by
regulations and guidelines relating to radiation or biological safety may
jeopardize his health and safety or the health and safety of staff and students.
Codes and Policies for Research Ethics Given the importance of ethics for the conduct
of research, it should come as no surprise that many different professional associations,
government agencies, and universities have adopted specific codes, rules, and policies
relating to research ethics. The following is a rough and general summary of some
ethical principals that various codes address*: Honesty Strive for honesty in all scientific
communications. Honestly report data, results, methods and procedures, and
publication status. Do not fabricate, falsify, or misrepresent data. Do not deceive
colleagues, research sponsors, or the public. Objectivity Strive to avoid bias in
experimental design, data analysis, data interpretation, peer review, personnel
decisions, grant writing, expert testimony, and other aspects of research where
objectivity is expected or required. Avoid or minimize bias or self-deception. Disclose
personal or financial interests that may affect research. Integrity Keep your promises
and agreements; act with sincerity; strive for consistency of thought and action.
Carefulness Avoid careless errors and negligence; carefully and critically examine your
own work and the work of your peers. Keep good records of research activities, such as
data collection, research design, and correspondence with agencies or journals.
Openness Share data, results, ideas, tools, resources. Be open to criticism and new
ideas. Respect for Intellectual Property Honor patents, copyrights, and other forms of
intellectual property. Do not use unpublished data, methods, or results without
permission. Give proper acknowledgement or credit for all contributions to research.
Never plagiarize. Confidentiality Protect confidential communications, such as papers or
grants submitted for publication, personnel records, trade or military secrets, and patient
records. Responsible Publication Publish in order to advance research and scholarship,
not to advance just your own career. Avoid wasteful and duplicative publication.
Responsible Mentoring Help to educate, mentor, and advise students. Promote their 6
welfare and allow them to make their own decisions. Respect for colleagues Respect
your colleagues and treat them fairly. Social Responsibility Strive to promote social
good and prevent or mitigate social harms through research, public education, and
advocacy. Non-Discrimination Avoid discrimination against colleagues or students on
the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or other factors not related to scientific competence and
integrity. Competence Maintain and improve your own professional competence and
expertise through lifelong education and learning; take steps to promote competence in
science as a whole. Legality Know and obey relevant laws and institutional and
governmental policies. Animal Care Show proper respect and care for animals when
using them in research. Do not conduct unnecessary or poorly designed animal
experiments. Human Subjects Protection When conducting research on human
subjects, minimize harms and risks and maximize benefits; respect human dignity,
privacy, and autonomy; take special precautions with vulnerable populations; and strive
to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly.
Ethical Decision Making in Research Although codes, policies, and principals are very
important and useful, like any set of rules, they do not cover every situation, they often
conflict, and they require considerable interpretation. It is therefore important for
researchers to learn how to interpret, assess, and apply various research rules and how
to make decisions and to act ethically in various situations. The vast majority of
decisions involve the straightforward application of ethical rules. Actions that nearly all
researchers classify as unethical are viewed as misconduct. It is important to
remember, however, that misconduct occurs only when researchers intend to deceive:
honest errors related to sloppiness, poor record keeping, miscalculations, bias, self-
deception, and even negligence do not constitute misconduct. Also, reasonable
disagreements about research methods, procedures, and interpretations do not
constitute research misconduct. There are many other activities that the government
does not define as "misconduct" but which are still regarded by most researchers as
unethical. These are sometimes referred to as "other deviations" from acceptable
research practices and include: ∙ Publishing the same paper in two different journals
without telling the editors ∙ Submitting the same paper to different journals without telling
the editors ∙ Not informing a collaborator of your intent to file a patent in order to make
sure that you are the sole inventor ∙ Including a colleague as an author on a paper in
return for a favor even though the colleague did not make a serious contribution to the
paper ∙ Discussing with your colleagues confidential data from a paper that you are
reviewing for a journal ∙ Using data, ideas, or methods you learn about while reviewing a
grant or a papers without permission ∙ Trimming outliers from a data set without
discussing your reasons in paper ∙ Using an inappropriate statistical technique in order
to enhance the significance of your research ∙ Bypassing the peer review process and
announcing your results through a press conference without giving peers adequate
information to review your work ∙ Conducting a review of the literature that fails to
acknowledge the contributions of other people in the field or relevant prior work ∙
Stretching the truth on a grant application in order to convince reviewers that your
project will make a significant contribution to the field ∙ Stretching the truth on a job
application or curriculum vita ∙ Giving the same research project to two graduate
students in order to see who can do it the fastest ∙ Overworking, neglecting, or
exploiting graduate or post-doctoral students ∙ Failing to keep good research records ∙
Failing to maintain research data for a reasonable period of time ∙ Making derogatory
comments and personal attacks in your review of author's submission ∙ Promising a
student a better grade for sexual favors ∙ Using a racist epithet in the laboratory ∙
Making significant deviations from the research protocol approved by your institution's
Animal Care and Use Committee or Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects
Research without telling the committee or the board ∙ Not reporting an adverse event in
a human research experiment ∙ Wasting animals in research ∙ Exposing students and
staff to biological risks in violation of your institution's biosafety rules ∙ Sabotaging
someone's work ∙ Stealing supplies, books, or data ∙ Rigging an experiment so you
know how it will turn out ∙ Making unauthorized copies of data, papers, or computer
programs ∙ Owning over $10,000 in stock in a company that sponsors your research 7
and not disclosing this financial interest ∙ Deliberately overestimating the clinical
significance of a new drug in order to obtain economic benefits
These actions would be regarded as unethical by most scientists and some might even
be illegal in some cases. Most of these would also violate different professional ethics
codes or institutional policies. However, they do not fall into the narrow category of
actions that the government classifies as research misconduct. Indeed, there has been
considerable debate about the definition of "research misconduct" and many
researchers and policy makers are not satisfied with the government's narrow definition
that focuses on FFP. However, given the huge list of potential offenses that might fall
into the category "other serious deviations," and the practical problems with defining
and policing these other deviations, it is understandable why government officials have
chosen to limit their focus.
Finally, situations frequently arise in research in which different people disagree about
the proper course of action and there is no broad consensus about what should be
done. In these situations, there may be good arguments on both sides of the issue and
different ethical principles may conflict. These situations create difficult decisions for
research known as ethical or moral dilemmas.
However, at some point he or she will have to make a decision and then take action.
Ideally, a person who makes a decision in an ethical dilemma should be able to justify
his or her decision to himself or herself, as well as colleagues, administrators, and other
people who might be affected by the decision. He or she should be able to articulate
reasons for his or her conduct and should consider the following questions in order to
explain how he or she arrived at his or her decision: . ∙ Which choice will probably have
the best overall consequences for science and society? ∙ Which choice could stand up
to further publicity and scrutiny? ∙ Which choice could you not live with? ∙ Think of the
wisest person you know. What would he or she do in this situation? ∙ Which choice
would be the most just, fair, or responsible? After considering all of these questions, one
still might find it difficult to decide what to do. If this is the case, then it may be
appropriate to consider others ways of making the decision, such as going with a gut
feeling or intuition, seeking guidance through prayer or meditation, or even flipping a
coin. Endorsing these methods in this context need not imply that ethical decisions are
irrational, however. The main point is that human reasoning plays a pivotal role in
ethical decision-making but there are limits to its ability to solve all ethical dilemmas in a
finite amount of time.
Moral judgement is not of the nature of logical judgement on the one hand, and of the
nature of aesthetical judgement on the other hand. Logical judgement refers to the ideal
of truth; aesthetical judgement refers to the ideal of beauty. But moral judgement refers
to the ideal of supreme good. Moreover, moral judgement is not like a logical
judgement, that it is not merely a judgement about, but a judgement upon an action.
Moral judgement is a judgement of value which evaluates the rightness or wrongness of
our actions. It has objective validity. It is critical and appreciative judgement and it is
inferential in character.
9
SCIENTIFIC CONDUCT 1. Ethics with respect to science and research 2. Intellectual
honesty and research integrity 3. Scientific misconducts: Falsification, Fabrication, and
Plagiarism (FFP) 4. Redundant publications: duplicate and overlapping publications,
salami slicing 5. Selective reporting and misrepresentation of data
Scientific Conduct
Relevant facts and information are not purposefully omitted even when such
things may contradict one's hypothesis;
Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading
impressions or to support one view over another;
Research integrity
Scientific misconducts are traced to cases when irrational activity not adhered to
the norms and guidelines set by authority. Authority may international agencies, national
agencies (UGC) or local (MDU)
Plagiarism definition
As an Unethical Act
Plagiarism is an unethical act as with no labour, hard work some gets credit
over other’s labour.
Creativity is discouraged 12
Prevention
Follow guidelines
Improve vocabulary
Software reading
For some reasons which is not possible by considering the large scale PhD
works produced and time constraint
Machine reading or reading the ‘text’ through software is a solution though not
exactly plagiarism rather similarity and matching
Salami Slicing
Authors do it to increase their publication count and to get more recognition, achieve
faster career progression may be to receive more funding by duping the funding
authority.
Ethically speaking you are not supposed to break up (slice) a study into
parts and present them as separate studies. Salami slicing is harmful to science
and entire academic research.
Readers may have the impression that each slice, which looks
independent. It increases the quantity of scientific literature instead of quality.
When your study is very large and addresses many distinct with related
questions, you may slice your research findings if by breaking the distinct nature
of research is retained
Selective reporting bias is when results from scientific research are deliberately
not fully or accurately reported, in order to suppress negative or undesirable findings.
The end result is that the findings are not reproducible, because they have been
skewed by bias during the analysis or writing stages.
Selective reporting is wasteful, leads to bias in the published record and harms the
credibility of science.
When most people think of ethics (or morals), they think of rules for distinguishing
between right and wrong. This is the most common way of defining "ethics": norms for
conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Most people
learn ethical norms at home, at school, in church, or in other social settings. Although
most people acquire their sense of right and wrong during childhood, moral
development occurs throughout life and human beings pass through different stages of
growth as they mature. Ethical norms are so omnipresent that one might be tempted to
regard them as simple commonsense. On the other hand, if morality were nothing more
than commonsense, then why are there so many ethical disputes and issues in our
society? One plausible explanation of these disagreements is that all people recognize
some common ethical norms but interpret, apply, and balance them in different ways in
light of their own values and life experiences. For example, two people could agree that
murder is wrong but disagree about the morality of abortion because they have different
understandings of what it means to be a human being. Most societies also have legal
rules that govern behavior, but ethical norms tend to be broader and more informal than
laws. Although most societies use laws to enforce widely accepted moral standards and
ethical and legal rules use similar concepts, ethics and law are not the same. An action
may be legal but unethical or illegal but ethical. One may also define ethics as a
method, procedure, or perspective for deciding how to act and for analyzing complex
problems and issues. Ethical norms also serve the aims or goals of research and apply
to people who conduct scientific research or other scholarly or creative activities. There
is even a specialized discipline, research ethics, which studies these norms. There are
several reasons why it is important to adhere to ethical norms in research.
- Third, many of the ethical norms help to ensure that researchers can be
held accountable to the public. For instance, federal policies on research
misconduct, conflicts of interest, the human subjects protections, and animal
care and use are necessary in order to make sure that researchers who are
funded by public money can be held accountable to the public.
- Fourth, ethical norms in research also help to build public support for
research. People are more likely to fund a research project if they can trust
the quality and integrity of research.
17
Codes and Policies for Research Ethics Given the importance of ethics for the
conduct of research, it should come as no surprise that many different professional
associations, government agencies, and universities have adopted specific codes,
rules, and policies relating to research ethics. The following is a rough and general
summary of some ethical principals that various codes address*: Honesty Strive for
honesty in all scientific communications. Honestly report data, results, methods and
procedures, and publication status. Do not fabricate, falsify, or misrepresent data. Do
not deceive colleagues, research sponsors, or the public. Objectivity Strive to avoid bias
in experimental design, data analysis, data interpretation, peer review, personnel
decisions, grant writing, expert testimony, and other aspects of research where
objectivity is expected or required. Avoid or minimize bias or self-deception. Disclose
personal or financial interests that may affect research. Integrity Keep your promises
and agreements; act with sincerity; strive for consistency of thought and action.
Carefulness Avoid careless errors and negligence; carefully and critically examine your
own work and the work of your peers. Keep good records of research activities, such as
data collection, research design, and correspondence with agencies or journals.
Openness Share data, results, ideas, tools, resources. Be open to criticism and new
ideas. Respect for Intellectual Property Honor patents, copyrights, and other forms of
intellectual property. Do not use unpublished data, methods, or results without
permission. Give proper acknowledgement or credit for all contributions to research.
Never plagiarize. Confidentiality Protect confidential communications, such as papers or
grants submitted for publication, personnel records, trade or military secrets, and patient
records. Responsible Publication Publish in order to advance research and scholarship,
not to advance just your own career. Avoid wasteful and duplicative publication.
Responsible Mentoring Help to educate, mentor, and advise students. Promote their
welfare and allow them to make their own decisions. Respect for colleagues Respect
your colleagues and treat them fairly. Social Responsibility Strive to promote social
good and prevent or mitigate social harms through research, public education, and
advocacy. Non-Discrimination Avoid discrimination against colleagues or students on
the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or other factors not related to scientific competence and
integrity. Competence Maintain and improve your own professional competence and
expertise through lifelong education and learning; take steps to promote competence in
science as a whole. Legality Know and obey relevant laws and institutional and
governmental policies. Animal Care Show proper respect and care for animals when
using them in research. Do not conduct unnecessary or poorly designed animal
experiments. Human Subjects Protection When conducting research on human
subjects, minimize harms and risks and maximize benefits; respect human dignity,
privacy, and autonomy; take special precautions with vulnerable populations; and strive
to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly.
18
Ethical Decision Making in Research Although codes, policies, and principals are
very important and useful, like any set of rules, they do not cover every situation, they
often conflict, and they require considerable interpretation. It is therefore important for
researchers to learn how to interpret, assess, and apply various research rules and how
to make decisions and to act ethically in various situations. The vast majority of
decisions involve the straightforward application of ethical rules. Actions that nearly all
researchers classify as unethical are viewed as misconduct. It is important to
remember, however, that misconduct occurs only when researchers intend to deceive:
honest errors related to sloppiness, poor record keeping, miscalculations, bias, self-
deception, and even negligence do not constitute misconduct. Also, reasonable
disagreements about research methods, procedures, and interpretations do not
constitute research misconduct.
There are many other activities that the government does not define as "misconduct"
but which are still regarded by most researchers as unethical. These are sometimes
referred to as "other deviations" from acceptable research practices and include: ∙
Publishing the same paper in two different journals without telling the editors ∙
Submitting the same paper to different journals without telling the editors ∙ Not informing
a collaborator of your intent to file a patent in order to make sure that you are the sole
inventor ∙ Including a colleague as an author on a paper in return for a favor even
though the colleague did not make a serious contribution to the paper ∙ Discussing with
your colleagues confidential data from a paper that you are reviewing for a journal ∙
Using data, ideas, or methods you learn about while reviewing a grant or a papers
without permission ∙ Trimming outliers from a data set without discussing your reasons
in paper ∙ Using an inappropriate statistical technique in order to enhance the
significance of your research ∙ Bypassing the peer review process and announcing your
results through a press conference without giving peers adequate information to review
your work ∙ Conducting a review of the literature that fails to acknowledge the
contributions of other people in the field or relevant prior work ∙ Stretching the truth on a
grant application in order to convince reviewers that your project will make a significant
contribution to the field ∙ Stretching the truth on a job application or curriculum vita ∙
Giving the same research project to two graduate students in order to see who can do it
the fastest ∙ Overworking, neglecting, or exploiting graduate or post-doctoral students ∙
Failing to keep good research records ∙ Failing to maintain research data for a
reasonable period of time ∙ Making derogatory comments and personal attacks in your
review of author's submission ∙ Promising a student a better grade for sexual favors ∙
Using a racist epithet in the laboratory ∙ Making significant deviations from the research
protocol approved by your institution's Animal Care and Use Committee or Institutional
Review Board for Human Subjects Research without telling the committee or the board ∙
19
Not reporting an adverse event in a human research experiment ∙ Wasting animals in
research ∙ Exposing students and staff to biological risks in violation of your institution's
biosafety rules ∙ Sabotaging someone's work ∙ Stealing supplies, books, or data ∙
Rigging an experiment so you know how it will turn out ∙ Making unauthorized copies of
data, papers, or computer programs ∙ Owning over $10,000 in stock in a company that
sponsors your research and not disclosing this financial interest ∙ Deliberately
overestimating the clinical significance of a new drug in order to obtain economic
benefits
These actions would be regarded as unethical by most scientists and some might even
be illegal in some cases. Most of these would also violate different professional ethics
codes or institutional policies. However, they do not fall into the narrow category of
actions that the government classifies as research misconduct. Indeed, there has been
considerable debate about the definition of "research misconduct" and many
researchers and policy makers are not satisfied with the government's narrow definition
that focuses on FFP. However, given the huge list of potential offenses that might fall
into the category "other serious deviations," and the practical problems with defining
and policing these other deviations, it is understandable why government officials have
chosen to limit their focus.
Finally, situations frequently arise in research in which different people disagree about
the proper course of action and there is no broad consensus about what should be
done. In these situations, there may be good arguments on both sides of the issue and
different ethical principles may conflict. These situations create difficult decisions for
research known as ethical or moral dilemmas.
However, at some point he or she will have to make a decision and then take action.
Ideally, a person who makes a decision in an ethical dilemma should be able to justify
his or her decision to himself or herself, as well as colleagues, administrators, and other
people who might be affected by the decision. He or she should be able to articulate
reasons for his or her conduct and should consider the following questions in order to
explain how he or she arrived at his or her decision: . ∙ Which choice will probably have
the best overall consequences for science and society? ∙ Which choice could stand up
to further publicity and scrutiny? ∙ Which choice could you not live with? ∙ Think of the
wisest person you know. What would he or she do in this situation? ∙ Which choice
would be the most just, fair, or responsible? After considering all of these questions, one
still might find it difficult to decide what to do. If this is the case, then it may be
appropriate to consider others ways of making the decision, such as going with a gut
feeling or intuition, seeking guidance through prayer or meditation, or even flipping a
coin. Endorsing these methods in this context need not imply that ethical decisions are
irrational, however. The main point is that human reasoning plays a pivotal role in 20
ethical decision-making but there are limits to its ability to solve all ethical dilemmas in a
finite amount of time.
● The avoidance of the risk of plagiarism and respect for intellectual property;
● Multiple submissions.
● Data fabrication and falsification. Data fabrication means the researcher did not
actually do the study, but made up data. ...
WAME has collaborated with the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of
Open Access Journals, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association to
develop the following Principles. The Principles are available on the Web sites of all the
participating organizations.
1. Website: A journal’s website, including the text that it contains, shall demonstrate
that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards. It must not
contain information that might mislead readers or authors, including any attempt to
mimic another journal/publisher’s site.
An ‘Aims & Scope’ statement should be included on the website and the readership
clearly defined. There should be a statement on what a journal will consider for
publication including authorship criteria (e.g., not considering multiple submissions,
redundant publications) to be included. ISSNs should be clearly displayed (separate for
print and electronic).
2. Name of journal: The Journal name shall be unique and not be one that is easily 23
confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about
the Journal’s origin or association with other journals.
3. Peer review process: Journal content must be clearly marked as whether peer
reviewed or not. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts
from reviewers expert in the field who are not part of the journal’s editorial staff. This
process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, shall be
clearly described on the journal website, including the method of peer review used.
Journal websites should not guarantee manuscript acceptance or very short peer review
times.
5. Governing body: Journals shall have editorial boards or other governing bodies
whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the
journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editorial board or other
governing body shall be provided on the journal’s website.
6. Editorial team/contact information: Journals shall provide the full names and
affiliations of the journal’s editors on the journal website as well as contact information
for the editorial office, including a full address.
7. Copyright and Licensing: The policy for copyright shall be clearly stated in the
author guidelines and the copyright holder named on all published articles. Likewise,
licensing information shall be clearly described in guidelines on the website, and
licensing terms shall be indicated on all published articles, both HTML and PDFs. If
authors are allowed to publish under a Creative Commons license then any specific
license requirements shall be noted. Any policies on posting of final accepted versions
or published articles on third party repositories shall be clearly stated.
8. Author fees: Any fees or charges that are required for manuscript processing and/or
publishing materials in the journal shall be clearly stated in a place that is easy for
potential authors to find prior to submitting their manuscripts for review or explained to
authors before they begin preparing their manuscript for submission. If no such fees
are charged that should also be clearly stated.
10. Publication Ethics: A journal shall also have policies on publishing ethics. These
should be clearly visible on its website, and should refer to: i) Journal policies on
authorship and contributorship; ii) How the journal will handle complaints and appeals;
iii) Journal policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests; iv) Journal policies on
data sharing and reproducibility; v) Journal’s policy on ethical oversight; vi) Journal’s
policy on intellectual property; and vii) Journal’s options for post-publication discussions
and corrections.
12. Access: The way(s) in which the journal and individual articles are available to
readers and whether there are associated subscription or pay per view fees shall be
stated.
13. Archiving: A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the
journal content (for example, access to main articles via CLOCKSS or PubMedCentral)
in the event a journal is no longer published shall be clearly indicated.
14. Revenue sources: Business models or revenue sources (e.g., author fees,
subscriptions, advertising, reprints, institutional support, and organizational support)
shall be clearly stated or otherwise evident on the journal’s website. Publishing fees or
waiver status should not influence editorial decision making.
15. Advertising: Journals shall state their advertising policy if relevant, including what
types of adverts will be considered, who makes decisions regarding accepting adverts
and whether they are linked to content or reader behavior (online only) or are displayed
at random. Advertisements should not be related in any way to editorial decision making
and shall be kept separate from the published content.
25
Conflicts of interests
Examples include a conflict between financial gain and meticulous completion and
reporting of a research study or between responsibilities as an investigator and as a
treating physician for the same trial participant.
● An academic who has a senior editorial position with a commercial journal is also
on a University library committee that recommends journal subscriptions
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Publication misconduct: definition, concept, problems that leads to unethical
behaviour
Fear of Reprisal When explaining why they don’t report ethical misconduct that they
witness, people often say it is because they worry about the ramifications. They don’t
want to damage their career or incur the wrath of the offender. Or, sometimes, they let
the infraction go because they don’t know how to report it or they feel that their report
may be ignored.
Impact of Peer Influence If everyone is doing it, it must be right. Or is it? What’s to
stop someone from padding their expense report when their co-workers do it but don’t
get caught? Too often people lapse into the bad behavior of others. People behave
unethically because they tend to perceive questionable behaviors exhibited by people
who are similar to them — like their co-workers — to be more acceptable than those
exhibited by people who they perceive as dissimilar, researchers say.
Going Down a Slippery Slope Misconduct starts small, such as the exaggeration of a
mileage report. But the longer it goes unchecked, the worse the offenses become. The
few extra dollars that came from the mileage report may eventually be dwarfed by larger
34
falsified expenses or perhaps even outright embezzlement. People who are faced with
growing opportunities to behave unethically are more likely to rationalize their
misconduct because unethical behavior becomes habit.
Setting a Bad Example Ethical behavior starts at the top. Employees emulate their
leaders, and the most significant factor in ethical leadership is personal character.
Corporate leaders who employees view as demonstrating personal character are more
likely to be perceived as setting a strong tone, researchers say. If employees see the
boss knocking off early every day, they may do likewise.
Ignoring the small stuff will not necessarily lead to the type of scandals that make the
news. But ethical misconduct could prove costly if it is not stopped. Identifying these
causes of unethical behavior in the workplace could prevent problems and minimize
damages.
5. Take a look at their peer review process and publication timelines. ...
1. Do you or your colleagues know the journal? Do you recognize the editorial board?
Online Database
• Some databases also include e-books, relevant Web resources, and various
multimedia.
• The information found in databases is either originally created or comes from different,
reliable sources.
37
Types of Databases
Accessing Databases
• Electronic databases can be accessed anywhere from remote location and users do
not need to go to the library to get information.
Why Databases?
- Databases provide fast results. They quickly scan through thousands of
sources including periodicals to find a match for your search item
- Do not need to flip page by page through journals and magazines looking for
something on your topic
- On the internet you may spend hours searching for an article from a real and
credible journal that is also on target with your topic.
– coverage of contents,
– interfaces.
Some of the well known online databases are (not exhaustive): – JSTOR, Lexus-
Nexus, Medline, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, Compendex, ERIC, Cambridge University
Press, Project Muse, Project Euclid, SIAM, MLA (English), WorldCat and so forth.
These are the excellent sources for those who are looking for authentic and credible
sources of information.
• An indexing service is a service that assigns descriptors and other kinds of access
points to documents.
• It has been observed in last few years that authors have started searching for indexed
journals to publish their articles.
Citation databases tend to focus on journal articles but may cover other material such
as books, conference papers, dissertations or reports. No citation database covers all
publications. Note also that some disciplines (e.g. the sciences) are more heavily
covered than others (e.g. the arts). Citation databases do not tend to provide a user
with full-text access to the publications which have been indexed.
• Citation database records also include bibliographic content that identify a publication:
article title, journal name, author, abstract, etc.
• Citation databases are databases that have been developed for evaluating
publications.
• The citation databases enable you to count citations and check, for example, which 40
articles or journals are the most cited ones.
♣ All the information relating to a single document (author, title, publication details,
abstract, and perhaps the full text) make up the ‘record’ for that document.
⎫ Article Impact: The number of times an article has been cited is often used to
measure that article's impact. citation databases such as Web of Science can
provide this data.
⎫ Journal Impact: Although controversial, the Journal Impact Factor, derived from
Web of Science citation data, remains a standard measure of a journal's
influence.
⎫ Author Impact: Total number of publications authored, total citations to an
author's body of work and metrics such as the h-index can be obtained from Web
of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar.
⎫ distinguish between authors with the same name, or an author's name that has
been presented in different ways
• Citation databases enable you to find newer papers that reference a paper or author
you already know about.
– trace how an idea has been confirmed, applied, extended or corrected in later
publications
– see which other researchers are citing your work or the work of your lab mates
– find citation numbers and metrics to report on job or grant applications,
evaluations, etc.
Summary
Web of Science
• A citation index is built on the fact that citations in science serve as linkages between
similar research items, and lead to matching or related scientific literature, such as
journal articles, conference proceedings, abstracts, etc.
• In addition, literature which shows the greatest impact in a particular field, or more
than one discipline, can be easily located through a citation index.
• For example, a paper's influence can be determined by linking to all the papers that
have cited it. In this way, current trends, patterns, and emerging fields of research can
be assessed.
Coverage
• Web of Science Core Collection have > 21,349 journals + books and conference
proceedings • Over 78 million records • More than 116,000 books • Over 220,000
conferences covered• Time period covered – Sciences: 1900-present – Social
Sciences: 1900-present – Arts & Humanities: 1975-present – Proceedings: 1990-
present – Books: 2005-present – Emerging Source Citation Index: 2005-present
Citation Databases • The Web of Science Core Collection consists of six online
databases: – Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) – Social Sciences Citation Index
(SSCI) – Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) – Emerging Sources Citation Index
(ESCI) – Book Citation Index (BKCI) – Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI)
Types of Literature • The following types of literature are indexed: – scholarly books, –
peer reviewed journals, – original research articles, – reviews, – editorials, –
chronologies, – abstracts, – as well as other items.
Features of WOS
• All the journals that are selected for inclusion in the collection are indexed cover-to-
cover.
• For each paper it captures: – all the authors – all author affiliations – the abstract and
keywords (if provided by the author) – funding acknowledgements, including agency
and grant numbers (if provided) – all the cited references
• When possible also add the following metadata for the indexed papers: – ORCID
identifiers – Additional funding data from Medline and researchfish – Unified institution
names – Organization name variants--the different ways authors refer to their
organization--have been unified to a preferred org name.
Other Features • Updated daily (Monday through Friday) • Ability to analyze search
results by author, affiliation, country, journal/book title, and broad subject categories.
Summary
SCOPUS
• Scopus traces citations and impact factors of articles in peer reviewed journals in all
subjects, and is especially strong in the sciences.
44
• The Scopus page allows us to browse a list of all journals, book series, trade
publications, and conference proceedings available on Scopus or other external web
sites by using Scopus.
• It covers three types of sources: book series, journals, and trade journals. • A great
way to locate important articles when you are building a research bibliography
• All journals covered in the Scopus database, regardless of who they are published
under, are reviewed each year to ensure high quality standards are maintained.
• Scopus gives four types of quality measure for each title; those are h-Index, CiteScore,
SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper).
hence, abstracting services can play a very important role in keeping him well informed.
An abstracting service is a service that provides abstracts of publications, often on a
subject or group of related subjects, usually on a subscription basis. Abstracting
services are important link in the chain of communication between the originator of
information and the user.
Abstracts are very important reference tools in research especially in the field of
science and Technology An abstract is useful for the current and retrospective
literature search on a chosen field, it may appear in current journals, as articles, papers,
reports, conference papers and proceedings etc. Abstract help in bringing information
to the notice of those who need it rather quickly and are extremely useful tools.
45
https://libguides.mssm.edu/c.php?g=168555&p=1107526
● WoS covers many fewer journal than Scopus, but it selects only "top tier"
journals: those most likely to publish major scholarly papers.
● Scopus covers more journals and more international journals than does WoS.
● Google Scholar only includes papers if they have online abstracts or full-text. No
one knows how much of the scholarly literature they cover. With Google Scholar,
you can't know what you are missing.
Do you need to identify core articles published before the dawn of the Internet? WoS
has full citation data for every paper it indexes back to 1900; Scopus has that data back
to 1996. We don't know how far Google Scholar goes back.
Do you need accurate citations for your paper's reference list or a bibliography? It's
better to use Web of Science or Scopus. Citation errors occur in all databases, but
Google Scholar's bibliographic information is extracted by robots performing an
automated Web search. As Google points out, this system may lead to incorrect
identification of bibliographic information, especially if metadata on publisher Web sites
is irregular. You may notice citation errors and/or duplicate citations when you search
Google Scholar.
How do you think the information you need will have been published? Google Scholar
covers many more types of documents than WoS and Scopus, e.g., dissertations,
books, technical reports and more. Google Scholar is great when you are looking for
more than journal articles.
Are you looking to identify the most important references in a paper's bibliography?
Trace the development of an idea backward in time? Both WoS and Scopus allow you
to see the references in an article without downloading the full-text. They both also
show how often each reference in the bibliography has been cited, making it easier to
identify core papers. Google Scholar does not provide "backward" citation searching.
Do you need to do a precise, targeted search? Google Scholar's main strength and
weakness is the simplicity of its user interface. Although some advanced search and
sorting options are available, there are many fewer than those in WoS and Scopus.
Are you looking for a topic that may have been mentioned in the full-text of an article,
but not in the citation or abstract? Google Scholar searches some full-text. As a result,
Google Scholar can sometimes retrieve papers that mention brand names, reagents,
abbreviations, etc. that cannot be found by searching with those terms in PubMed, WoS
or Scopus.
For a concise summary of similarities and differences, please see the table below which
compares the search features of Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.
47
Indexing and abstracting periodicals are called secondary publications. They are the
access tools to already published primary documents such as, articles/papers in
newspapers and periodicals, research papers, reports, patents, conference proceedings
and so on. They are also referred to as indexing and abstracting services as they are
used to provide information, services. As a consequence of growing increase in the
volume of literature, published specially in periodicals, the indexing and abstracting
periodicals have proliferated. Consequently, the need to have bibliographical control
and easy access to the evergrowing world of information and knowledge is also
increasing. As broader subject areas may result in covering a rather unmanageable
volume of literature output, indexing and abstracting periodicals are now brought out.
Indexing and Abstracting in more narrow specialised subject fields. Not only is the
number of indexing and abstracting periodicals continuously on the increase; but also
the number of articles and the documents covered by these periodicals. Periodicals In
order to bring out the indexing and abstracting periodicals, a large volume of literature is
collected, processed, organised and stored in a machine-readable form. Such stored
information is now days familiarly known as databases, which are used for search and
retrieval of information.
48
Definition The word `index' is derived from the Latin word `indicare' meaning `to point
out' or `to show'. An indexing periodical is an access tool to a systematically arranged
list of periodical literature providing complete bibliographical references of already
published individual items of primary documents, which a republished in regular interval.
It is organised in a convenient manner to search the location of entries. An Index can be
alphabetical, classified, chronological, geographical or numerical. They are access tools
to identify and locate the required information which appeared in a particular periodical,
Needs At present the number of research journals published in the world is or 130,000
according to Ulrich's International Periodicals' Directory. The number of articles
published in these journals may amount to millions of items. Thus, the volume of
primary literature, published specially in periodicals is growing at a fast speed and rate.
It is, therefore, impossible for scholars to know about the documents in which they may
be interested. Due to problems of scatter and seepage of information, the scholars are
unaware of literature in a particular subject appearing in totally alien sources published
in various countries. The scholars cannot remain self-satisfied with available literature, if
they have to keep pace with changing dimension of knowledge. In such a complex
situation, scholars require some help to save their time and effort in locating and having
access to information from a huge stockpile of information sources. The I & A
periodicals are convenient tools to provide scholars a bird's eye view of literature of their
specific interest easily and quickly. They cover information from vast volume of primary
literature scattered in a numerous sources in fewer pages. The abstracting periodicals
help users in further reducing the effort of scanning by giving an idea of the information
content of documents and its relevance to the purpose. The I & A periodicals also fulfil
the requirements of scholar who needs to scan information from the earlier literature on
the subject for a problem undertaken for study or research. The I & A periodicals are
tools of reference and constantly consulted in libraries and information centres. A
representative collection of I & A periodicals in various disciplines are sub-scribed to by
the library to fulfil the demand of users. These periodicals m iced for identifying
documents which contain specific information needed to answer numerous enquiries of
users and for developing a state-of-art review or compiling a bibliography on a specific
topic. Libraries and information centres generate many information services and
products based on the materials contained in the I & A periodicals.
Qualities Coverage: In order to fulfil the functions, the I & A periodicals should, as far 50
as possible, be comprehensive in reporting the literature so that they can be relied upon
as an exhaustive source of information. It is necessary, at least, to specify and maintain
consistency in the scope and criteria of coverage so as to ensure the user as to what to
expect.
Time lag: The indexing and abstracting periodicals should report literature with as little
time lag as possible after publication of the original so that the most recent and current
information is made available to the users.
Indexes: The indexing and abstracting periodicals should have high retrieval efficiency
through provision of quality indexes. The search should yield optimum recall and
relevance of desired information.
Scope I & A periodicals attempt to cover current literature with as little time lag as
possible. Because of time and effort involved in production, speed of reporting literature
is not a foremost consideration as in the case of current awareness type publications. I
& A periodicals may be exhaustive or selective in coverage of literature depending upon
the purpose. Indexing periodicals, because of comparative ease in production, may aim
at an exhaustive coverage of literature. Abstracting periodicals have to be necessarily
selective in coverage, as all documents may not be suitable for abstracting from the
point of view of their content. Thus, abstracting periodicals may, in some cases, include
documents with bibliographical description giving indicative abstract only. I & A
periodicals may cover all kinds of primary documents such as books, journal articles,
pamphlets and bulletins, reports, patents and standard specifications. In some cases,
the cover-age may be limited to a particular kind of documents. There are also I&A 51
periodicals devoted to unpublished literature and sources such as research reports,
university theses and dissertations, proceedings of conferences, seminars, meetings,
etc. are also covered therein.
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/33138/1/Unit-4.pdf
1. Introduction The most fundamental problem facing journal readers, library users and,
it follows, librarians, is physically to get hold of all the journal articles they need when
they need them. Experience varies enormously of course, but the days in which every
essential journal was held in all major academic libraries have passed. The reason most
commonly cited is the economic, prices of scholarly journals have been increasing at
rates much higher than inflation. There has also been growth in the number of journal
titles, which reflects changes within traditional academic disciplines: broadening and
subsequent fragmentation within fields, and greater emphasis on cross-disciplinary
work. The problem is compounded by many other things such as shrinking number of
publishers since the smaller publishers are getting bought by the bigger ones, etc. The
shrinking number of publishers combined with the veritable monopoly writers grant
publishers makes for higher prices. Academic authors have a choice of how they
publish and provide access to their research. Traditionally, academic authors have
communicated their research through peer reviewed scholarly journals, which have
become increasingly managed and controlled by publishers as a commercial enterprise.
The vast majority of these publishers charge for, and therefore limit, access to journals.
However, the number of authors choosing to make their research freely available
through an open access route is increasing. The volume of scientific literature typically
far exceeds the ability of scientists to identify and utilize all relevant information in their
research. Improvements to the accessibility of scientific literature, allowing scientists to
locate more relevant research within a given time, have the potential to dramatically
improve communication and progress in science. With the web, scientists now have
very convenient access to an increasing amount of literature that previously required
trips to the library, inter-library loan delays, or substantial effort in locating the source.
1.1 Open Access Journals Open access journals maintain the traditional values of
journals: notably peer review, but also editing and formatting, and marketing. What is
different is that OA journals are free to the end-user. Velterop gave three criteria for a
journal to be open access: free accessibility to all articles, the depositing of all articles in
an archive/repository, and a licence granted for the right to copy or disseminate
(Velterop, 2003). Some journal publishers currently offer delayed free access, or back
access, making issues of journals free after six months or a year. In fast moving topics,
such material can be out of date when the majority gain access. OA journal publishers
such as the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS) or for-profit BioMed Central
53
(BMC) allow immediate free access, or OA. Although these journals charge author fees,
only a minority of existing OA journals do so. In some cases costs are supported by
funding bodies and associations (Suber, 2005a). Many OA journals make their article
metadata available in an OAI-compliant format, meaning that OAI service providers can
harvest the metadata: “In other words, e-prints in the form of open access journal
content are available to all and the pointers to them are easily harvestable” (Swan et al,
2004). While there has been growth in the number of OA journals and articles, numbers
of articles are still relatively low compared to those published in established subscription
journals. Every type of traditional scholarly information is available digitally in open
access format. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) at Southampton
University, the Experimental OAI Registry at University of Illinois, the Directory of Open
Access Repositories (DOAR) created by University of Lund and University of
Nottingham have up-to-date information about the variety of repositories, and provide
handy discovery tools for discovering open access scholarly databases. There is
considerable overlap among these. ROAR has the valuable extra feature of charting the
growth of many of the repositories. DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals
maintained by University of Lund, and OAIster managed by Michigan University also
provide a good overview of the variety and size of more than 2,380 open access
journals and about 685 institutional digital archives, respectively. Both of them have the
very important additional bonus to allow searching their content at the item level. DOAJ
has 1,08,004 articles while OAIster has 9,407,171 records from 678 institutions. The
numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, especially in OAIster, as the same items
may appear in two or more digital collections. 408 There are many genres of open
access digital collections. These include open access digital monographs, dictionaries,
encyclopedias, directory databases, numerical databases, audio/image/ video
databases, beyond the most prevalent textual databases of journal articles and
conference presentations. In the textual database category there are digital bibliography
collections (without subject descriptors), indexing databases, indexing & abstracting
databases, and full text databases. The link is the single most important, characteristic
feature of Web pages. The link allows us to approach an information resource in which
any item of information is, potentially, an instant of a ‘click’ away, but to exploit this
potential requires ingenuity and more flexible systems to be able to design and apply
links more effectively than we do now. A way in which this feature of the Web can be
used immediately to enhance journal papers is to build on established practice by
linking citations to the cited articles. 2. Open Access Indexing & Abstracting Databases
Although availability varies greatly by discipline, over a million research articles are
freely available on the web. Some journals and conferences provide free access online,
others allow authors to post articles on the web, and others allow authors to purchase
the right to post their articles on the web. For example, efficient means of locating
articles via web search engines or specialized search services is required, and a
substantial percentage of the literature needs to be indexed by these search services
54
before it is worthwhile for many scientists to use them. Computer science is a
forerunner in web availability — a substantial percentage of the literature is online and
available through search engines such as Google, or specialized services such as
ResearchIndex. Even so, the greatest impact of the online availability of computer
science literature is likely yet to come, because comprehensive search services and
more powerful search methods have only become available recently. When print articles
and journal issues were simply discrete entities, libraries and secondary publishers
provided some integration through services such as bibliographic cataloguing, indexing
and abstracting. The prime role played by Abstracting and Indexing databases in pre-
internet era, is now diminishing these days because the full-text databases are the most
sought after. To appreciate the importance of the open access indexing databases, one
has to remember that until the late 1980s they were the most common ready reference
database species in the libraries which spent huge amount of money for licensing them.
The H.W. Wilson company, for example, had only indexing databases for many years. It
was only in the early 1990s that for example Agricultural Index was enhanced with
abstracts to become Agricultural Abstracts. These are –understandably- not open
access as the content providers like H.W. Wilson, make their profit (and spend a lot of
money) on creating these indexing/abstracting databases. However, beyond the most
well-known indexing-abstracting databases produced by government agencies, like
Medline, ERIC, AGRICOLA, NTIS, etc. there are other open access indexing/
abstracting databases. Most importantly, the largest commercial and society publishers
of scholarly journals, conference proceedings and books, such as the American
Chemical Society, IoP, APS, Elsevier, Springer, Taylor 409 & Francis, Emerald Press
and many of the smaller publishers offer together open access to tens of millions of
bibliographic records with abstracts for scholarly journal articles and conference papers.
Some of them do so directly, others, through their digital facilitators, like SAGE, Oxford
University Press through HighWire Press, Springer, and Taylor & Francis through
MetaPress, and Palgrave Macmillan and many others through IngentaConnect.
Publishers migrate from one digital facilitator to another, and/or let one handle some of
their journals, and another the rest of their journals. Many government agencies and
professional bodies sponsoring and managing many projects at the national level in
several countries to improve access to local research through supporting the publishing
of indigenous scholarly journals, and the creation of indexing/abstracting databases to
increase the visibility of locally and regionally pertinent research results, and to facilitate
open access to the full text archives of the largest scholarly publishers. 3. Citation
Indexing Bibliometrics is the application of quantitative methods to analyse and identify
patterns in the usage of materials, or the historical development of a specific body of
literature, in particular its authorship, publication, and use. Bibliometric techniques are
often adopted for the assessment of authors, departments and higher education
institutions. The ISI Web of Knowledge database has been used for bibliometric
assessment and evaluative purposes by many groups and organisations. The term
55
‘citation’ refers to a paper being cited by another author. A cited work is a paper that has
been mentioned in another paper, while a citing work refers to other cited papers that it
references (Garfield, n.d). Citation indexing is the process of building an index of
citations to cited items. A citation index is a database connecting citing articles to cited
articles. While in a given paper its reference list points to earlier work as influences, only
a citation index can provide a list of the later papers that cited the given paper. Citation
indexes are used for citation analysis. With the growth of online capabilities, citation
indexes and analysis have become more sophisticated. More full-text content is now
available online, providing connections between documents in the form of citations and
hyperlinks. With the rise in OA journals and repositories there is potential for a greater
number of journals and articles to be included in online citation indexes. While ISI was
once the only source of information providing citation data, online technologies have
meant that new citation indexes, some automated, have been developed. 4. Citation
Indexes Searching for cited and citing references has its own special output
requirements which help the users to find the most cited papers by an author, journal or
on a subject. As citation searching gains acceptance, there will be a growing demand to
display information prominently about the absolute and relative citedness of the papers,
and to sort the search results by citedness score. For decades the family of Science
Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation
Index of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) represented the only databases
which included the list of cited references. The introduction of the Web of Science
(WoS) service on the Web of Knowledge (WoK) platform a few years ago brought out
much more from this unique database than the few existing implementations by online
aggregators (DataStar, DIALOG, DIMDI). 410 Others also realized the immense
advantage of using cited and citing references to complement subject searches, and to
discover scholarly papers which would not be found by subject searching for several
reasons. Elsevier jumped on the bandwagon with vigour by launching the Scopus
database. Its tagline emphasizes that it is the largest indexing/abstracting database, but
its special value is in the close to eight million records enhanced with about 180 million
cited references. The majority of these are included in the records prepared for
scholarly articles and conference papers published after 1995. Publishers increasingly
offer hot-linked, actionable cited references in their digital archives. HighWire Press, by
far the best of the digital facilitators which help publishers in digitizing their archives,
goes a step further. It automatically displays a list of short entries of the articles
published in journals in its stable which cite the article being looked at. There is still
much to be done to exploit the power of cited references which provide a network of
related papers deemed relevant by the authors to cite. These citing links become bi-
directional as soon as a citing paper is cited by a subsequent paper, and the network of
related papers keeps growing – exactly as envisioned by Eugene Garfield in creating
his citation indexes 50 years ago. Obviously, these intellectual links are so much easier
to follow on the web and should be presented prominently at every phase when the
56
output of a search is displayed. The Open Access movement comprises many
complementary initiatives, including digital scholarly journals, discipline-specific e-print
servers, institutional repositories, and author self-archiving (Jacso, 2006). While these
initiatives vary in intent, scope, and implementation, they all support the same concept:
that scholarly research should serve the interests of the scholars themselves, and that
those interests are best served by the broadest access to the largest body of high-
quality research. 5. Citation Indexing Services Existing citation indexing services include
both pay-to-use selective journal indexing, and free-touse Web indexing. Selective
journal indexing services: ISI Web of Knowledge, Elsevier’s Scopus and CrossRef are
examples of selective journal citation indexing, and are provided on a commercial basis.
https://ir.inflibnet.ac.in:8443/ir/bitstream/1944/1319/1/406-417.pdf
(B) Research Metrics 1. Impact Factor of journal as per Journal Citation Report, SNIP,
SIR, IPP, Cite Score 2. Metrics: h-index, g index, i10 index, altmetrics
Research metrics are the fundamental tools used across the publishing industry to
measure performance, both at journal- and author-level
Why do we need research evaluation metrics
Traditional Metrics Measure Inputs and Size Can no longer demonstrate their
educational and scholarly impact via traditional measures such as the number
programmes/Size Gate count, and Footfall New measures of success (still 57
under development)
Evolving Metrics Aligned With Value, but Hard to Quantify • Impact on student
learning • Contribution to research productivity • Research Impact • Grant
proposals and funding • Awards/Recognition • Ranking/ Funding
For example, the 2017 Impact Factors (released in 2018) used the following
calculation: Number of citations received in 2017 to content published in Journal X
during 2015 and 2016, divided by the total number of articles and reviews published in
Journal X in 2015 and 2016.
How can I get an Impact Factor for my journal? Only journals selected to feature in
the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
receive an official Impact Factor. To be eligible for coverage in these Web of Science
indices, journals must meet a wide range of criteria. For many journals, the first step to 58
receiving an Impact Factor is to feature in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).
1. The Impact Factor is an arithmetic mean and doesn’t adjust for the distribution of
citations. This means that one highly-cited article can have a major positive effect on the
Impact Factor, skewing the result for the two years. Most journals have a highly-skewed
citation distribution, with a handful of highly-cited articles and many low- or zero-cited
articles.
2. The JCR doesn’t distinguish between citations made to articles, reviews, or
editorials. So that the Impact Factor doesn’t penalize journals that publish rarely-cited
content like book reviews, editorials, or news items, these content types are not counted
in the denominator of the calculation (the total number of publications within the two-
year period). However, citations to this kind of content are still counted. This creates two
main problems. Firstly, the classification of content is not subjective, so content such as
extended abstracts or author commentaries fall into an unpredictable gray area.
Secondly, if such articles are cited, they increase the Impact Factor without any offset in
the denominator of the equation.
3. The Impact Factor only considers the number of citations, not the nature or
quality. An article may be highly cited for many reasons, both positive and negative. A
high Impact Factor only shows that the research in a given journal is being cited. It
doesn’t indicate the context or the quality of the publication citing the research.
4. You can’t compare Impact Factors like-for-like across different subject areas.
Different subject areas have different citation patterns, which reflects in their Impact
Factors. Research in subject areas with typically higher Impact Factors (cell biology or
general medicine, for example) is not better or worse than research in subject areas
with typically lower Impact Factors (such as mathematics or history). The difference in
Impact Factor is simply a reflection of differing citation patterns, database coverage, and
dominance of journals between the disciplines. Some subjects generally have longer
reference lists and publish more articles, so there’s a larger pool of citations. Impact
5. Factors can show significant variation year-on-year, especially in smaller
journals. Because Impact Factors are average values, they vary year-on-year due to
random fluctuations. This change is related to the journal size (the number of articles
published per year): the smaller the journal, the larger the expected fluctuation.
What is the 5-year Impact Factor? The 5-year Impact Factor is a modified version of
the Impact Factor, using five years’ data rather than two. A journal must be covered by
the JCR for five years or from Volume 1 before receiving a 5-year Impact Factor. The 5-
year Impact Factor calculation is:
Number of citations in one year to content published in Journal X during the
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previous five years, divided by the total number of articles and reviews published
in Journal X within the previous five years.
The 5-year Impact Factor is more useful for subject areas where it takes longer
for work to be cited, or where research has more longevity. It offers more stability for
smaller titles as there are a larger number of articles and citations included in the
calculation. However, it still suffers from many of the same issues as the traditional
Impact Factor
CITESCORE
Journals that publish a large amount of front matter (such as editorials or peer
commentaries) will perform worse by CiteScore than by Impact Factor because this
front matter is rarely cited
2. What are the differences between CiteScore and Impact Factor?
1 CiteScore is based on the Scopus database rather than Web of Science. This
means the number of citations and journal coverage in certain subject areas is
notably higher.
2 CiteScore uses a three-year citation window, whereas Impact Factor uses a
two-year citation window.
3 The CiteScore denominator includes all content published in the journal. The
Impact Factor denominator includes only articles and reviews.
4 CiteScore covers all subject areas, whereas the Impact Factor is only available
for journals indexed in the SCIE and SSCI.
CiteScore suffers from some of the same problems as Impact factor; namely that it isn’t
comparable across disciplines and it is a mean calculated from a skewed distribution.
In practice, this means that a citation from a publication with a long reference list
has a lower value. SNIP only considers citations to specific content types (articles,
reviews, and conference papers), and does not count citations from publications that
Scopus classifies as “non-citing sources”. These include trade journals, and many Arts
& Humanities titles.
SJR - SCIMAGO JOURNAL RANK The SJR aims to capture the effect of subject field,
quality, and reputation of a journal on citations. It calculates the prestige of a journal by
considering the value of the sources that cite it, rather than counting all citations equally.
Each citation received by a journal is assigned a weight based on the SJR of the citing
journal. So, a citation from a journal with a high SJR value is worth more than a citation
from a journal with a low SJR value. The SJR calculation is:
h-INDEX
1. What is the h-index? The h-index is an author-level research metric, first
introduced by Hirsch in 2005. The h-index attempts to measure the productivity of a
researcher and the citation impact of their publications. The basic h-index calculation is:
Number of articles published which have received the same number of citations.
For example, if you’ve published at least 10 papers that have each been cited 10
times or more, you will have a h-index of 10.
A h-index of 20 means that an academic has published at least 20 papers that have
received at least 20 citations each. The h-index thus combines an assessment of both
quantity (number of papers) and an approximation of quality (impact, or citations to
these papers).
2. What are the advantages of the h-index? Results aren’t skewed The main advantage
of the h-index is that it isn’t skewed upwards by a small number of highly-cited papers. It 61
also isn’t skewed downwards by a long tail of poorly-cited work. The h-index rewards
researchers whose work is consistently well cited. That said, a handful of well-placed
citations can have a major effect.
G-index
g-index, proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, 2006,
as an improvement to the h-index. The g-index gives more weight to highly-cited
articles.
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To calculate the g-index:
Introduced in 2007, and the debate continues whether the g-index is superior to
the h-index. It is not as widely accepted as the h-index.
i10-index
h-index
My record shows a higher h-index than that of Maria. This is not surprising, given that
she has published fewer papers and hence it is more difficult for her to achieve a high h-
index. In Maria’s case, only one third of her papers are not included in the h-index. In
my case, this is true for nearly 60% of my papers. That said, given that her h-index is
lower, it is easier for her to increase it further as her next paper only needs to acquire 27
citations to be included, whereas my next paper needs to acquire 46 citations.
g-index
My g-index is more than twice as high as that of Maria. The simple reason is that neither
the g-index nor the h-index can be higher than the total number of papers published and
Maria has “only” published 41 papers so far. Hence, the maximum her g-index can
reach is 41. Even if she would publish another paper without any citations, her g-index
would still increase. This is clearly a limitation of the g-index.
Conclusions
The h-index and g-index are both limited by the number of papers one publishes. Hence
these indices – and especially the g-index – will always favour academics that publish
more papers (provided they are cited at least moderately well). These indices are
therefore not very suitable to assess the impact of academics that have published one
or two ground-breaking contributions, but have not published any further highly cited
work. For these academics, the total number of citations might be a more appropriate
metric. That’s exactly why Publish or Perish provides a wide range of metrics. The
variety of metrics allows you to select the metrics most appropriate to your purpose.
Altmetrics
1. What are altmetrics? Alternative metrics (or “altmetrics”) help you to measure the 64
impact of a journal by looking at the social activity around it. They use quantitative and
qualitative data alongside traditional citation- and usage-based metrics to provide an
insight into the attention, influence and impact of academic research. The most common
method of reporting on altmetrics is the Altmetric Attention Score. This tool tracks a
wide range of online sources to capture the conversations happening around academic
research.
2. How is the Altmetric Attention Score calculated? Altmetric monitors each online
mention of a piece of research and weights the mentions based on volume, sources,
and authors. A mention in an international newspaper contributes to a higher score than
a tweet about the research, for example. The Altmetric Attention Score is presented
within a colorful donut. Each color indicates a different source of online attention
(ranging from traditional media outlets to social media, blogs, online reference
managers, academic forums, patents, policy documents, the Open Syllabus Project,
and more). A strong Altmetric Score will feature both a high number in the center, and a
wide range of colors in the donut. Discover the different ways you can make Altmetric
data work for you by reading this introduction from Altmetric’s Head of Marketing, Cat
Chimes.
b. Get a holistic view of attention, impact and influence The data Altmetric
gathers provides a more all-encompassing, nuanced view of the attention,
impact, and influence of a piece of research than traditional citation-based
metrics. Digging deeper into the Altmetric Attention Score can reveal not only the
nature and volume of online mentions, but also who’s talking about the research,
where in the world these conversations are happening, and which online
platforms they’re using.
b. Limited to tracking online attention The Altmetric Attention Score was built 65
to track digital conversations. This means that attention from sources with little
direct online presence (like a concert, or a sculpture) are not included. Even for
online conversations, Altmetric can only track mentions when the source either
references the article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or uses two pieces of
information (i.e. article title and author name)
https://editorresources.taylorandfrancis.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/Understanding-research-metrics.pdf
Unit - IV
1.1 Open Access Journals Open access journals maintain the traditional values of
journals: notably peer review, but also editing and formatting, and marketing. What
is different is that OA journals are free to the end-user.
1.3 Some journal publishers currently offer delayed free access, or back access,
making issues of journals free after six months or a year. In fast moving topics, 66
such material can be out of date when the majority gain access. Some OA journal
allow immediate free access, or OA. Although these journals charge author fees,
only a minority of existing OA journals do so. In some cases costs are supported by
funding bodies and associations. Many OA journals make their article metadata
available in an OAI-compliant format, meaning that OAI service providers can
harvest the metadata: “In other words, e-prints in the form of open access journal
content are available to all and the pointers to them are easily harvestable”.
1.4 While there has been growth in the number of OA journals and articles, numbers of
articles are still relatively low compared to those published in established
subscription journals. Every type of traditional scholarly information is available
digitally in open access format. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
at Southampton University, the Experimental OAI Registry at University of Illinois,
the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) created by University of Lund
and University of Nottingham have up-to-date information about the variety of
repositories, and provide handy discovery tools for discovering open access
scholarly databases.
1.5 There are many genres of open access digital collections. These include open
access digital monographs, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, directory databases,
numerical databases, audio/image/ video databases, beyond the most prevalent
textual databases of journal articles and conference presentations. In the textual
database category there are digital bibliography collections (without subject
descriptors), indexing databases, indexing & abstracting databases, and full text
databases. The link is the single most important, characteristic feature of Web
pages. The link allows us to approach an information resource in which any item of
information is, potentially, an instant of a ‘click’ away, but to exploit this potential
requires ingenuity and more flexible systems to be able to design and apply links
more effectively than we do now. A way in which this feature of the Web can be
used immediately to enhance journal papers is to build on established practice by
linking citations to the cited articles.
1.6 Open Access Indexing & Abstracting Databases Although availability varies
greatly by discipline, over a million research articles are freely available on the web.
Some journals and conferences provide free access online, others allow authors to
post articles on the web, and others allow authors to purchase the right to post their
articles on the web. Efficient means of locating articles via web search engines or
specialized search services is required, and a substantial percentage of the
literature needs to be indexed by these search services before it is worthwhile for
many scientists to use them. When print articles and journal issues were simply
discrete entities, libraries and secondary publishers provided some integration
through services such as bibliographic cataloguing, indexing and abstracting. The
prime role played by Abstracting and Indexing databases in pre-internet era, is now
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diminishing these days because the full-text databases are the most sought after.
However, beyond the most well-known indexing-abstracting databases produced by
government agencies, like Medline, there are other open access indexing/
abstracting databases. Most importantly, the largest commercial and society
publishers of scholarly journals, conference proceedings and books, such as the
American Chemical Society, IoP, APS, Elsevier, Springer, Emerald Press and
many of the smaller publishers offer together open access to tens of millions of
bibliographic records with abstracts for scholarly journal articles and conference
papers. Some of them do so directly, others, through their digital facilitators, like
SAGE, Oxford University Press through HighWire Press, Springer. Publishers
migrate from one digital facilitator to another, and/or let one handle some of their
journals, and another the rest of their journals. Many government agencies and
professional bodies sponsoring and managing many projects at the national level in
several countries to improve access to local research through supporting the
publishing of indigenous scholarly journals, and the creation of indexing/abstracting
databases to increase the visibility of locally and regionally pertinent research
results, and to facilitate open access to the full text archives of the largest scholarly
publishers.
Open Access (OA) initiative emerged as a revolutionary movement that promotes
free access to scholarly publications over the Internet, removes the price and
permission barriers and ensures the widest possible dissemination of research.
The policy information provided through this service primarily aims to serve the
academic research community. Since the service launched over 15 years ago, publisher
policies and the open access sector have changed a lot. Open access policy can be
complex and varies according to geographical location, the institution, and the various
routes to open access — all of which affects how and where you can publish your
research.
These journals are considered predatory journals because scholars are forced into
publishing with them, although some authors may be aware that the journal is of poor
quality or predatory.
A recent analysis of who is publishing in such spurious Journals has indicated that most
authors in predatory journals are from developing countries, especially India, Nigeria,
and some African and Middle East countries. 69
In such a situation, the appointment of this committee by the Hon Vice Chancellor,
Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) is commendable.
Here are useful online resources that provide journal suggestions or recommendation to
researchers.
Elsevier® Journal Finder helps you find journals that could be best suited for publishing
your scientific article. Powered by the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine™, Elsevier Journal
Finder uses smart search technology and field-of-research specific vocabularies to
match your article to Elsevier journals.
Search 170+ periodicals and 1500+ conferences. Compare critical points such as
Impact Factor and Submission-To-Publication Time. Get all the key data about IEEE
publications at a glance.
3. Springer Journal Suggester
Search over 2,500 journals (Springer and BioMed Central) to find the most suitable
journal for your manuscript. Easily compare relevant journals to find the best place for
publication.
This service originates in the UK. Established for two years and has over 50 freelance
editors. This one offers an options menu to find journals that match your requirements.
7. Journal Guide
After all, the best way to become familiar with the top journals in your field is to:
● Read may articles in your area of study and take note of where the best ones are
published.