Tag: Publishing

Twelve scientist-endorsed tips to get over writer’s block

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Paul Silvia was trying to write his first book — about the psychology of motivation — in 2003. He had a publishing contract and a deadline that he had missed, and although he was churning out shorter articles, grant proposals and research papers, he was not making any progress on his book. At one point, he went nine months without “even doing the smallest thing on it”. He could not motivate himself to work on a book about motivation: “The irony of that was totally apparent to me at the time,” he says.

Silvia, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, was dealing with writer’s block — the experience of getting stuck on a writing project. He started researching the habits of professional authors and asking colleagues about their writing strategies. Their insights helped him to finish his book, called Exploring the Psychology of Interest, which he published in 2006. He later published two more about writing in academia: How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (2007) and Write It Up: Practical Strategies for Writing and Publishing Journal Articles (2014).

One major lesson: there will never be a perfect time to write. “That was the first switch to really flip,” he says.

Although writer’s block is common, it can come as a surprise to scientists, says César Soto Valero, a computer scientist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has seen many graduate students go days without getting any words on the page, and a few give up on academia as a result of their frustrations.

Careers Collection: Publishing

“Some people choose to do science because they want to do experiments, because they want to write code, because they want to try new things,” Soto Valero says. “Then, after they realize that the research is mostly about writing research papers, they struggle a lot because they find out that writing a research paper is very hard.”

Soto Valero, Silvia and other scientists shared their advice on how to conquer the block and put pen to paper.

Know thy enemy

Writer’s block has a few main causes, Silvia says, and having the self-awareness to recognize which one is affecting you is important. One is a tendency to confuse worrying with doing. “If you’re thinking about something a lot,” he says, “that doesn’t really mean you’re working on it.”

There is also the misconception that you need to clear your entire to-do list and carve out big blocks of time to get any writing done — a mindset that can become a form of procrastination, because it provides an excuse not to start. Silvia cites a prime example: stymied by lack of progress, an academic goes on a week-long retreat in a cosy rural cabin where they can focus solely on writing. But this can lead to disappointment when they end up wasting a lot of time in the local coffee shop instead of focusing on the task at hand. “The stakes are really high,” he says, “and if the first day goes wrong, you get really depressed.”

Create routines

Silvia recommends that researchers treat writing as if it’s a class that they have to teach: block out time for it on your calendar, and stick to the schedule. To get over his own writer’s block, Silvia designated 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. every weekday as writing time. He even chose a room at home for writing, so he had a dedicated workspace.

Building consistency took a lot of pressure off. If the two hours went badly, he knew he would have another chance to write more the next day, and he was less likely to be discouraged or feel as if he had wasted a large chunk of time. Once he started making progress, he was able to write more.

“Productivity builds on momentum,” he says. “It’s self-reinforcing to see something move along.”

Clarify the message

Andrea Armani, a chemical engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, often sees students struggle when they sit down to write a paper, because they don’t know what they’re trying to say. She recommends that they ask themselves a few main questions: “What is the hypothesis statement? What is the point of my paper? What am I trying to prove?”

Training: Writing a research paper

Armani advises students to use their answers to develop a vision statement that articulates “the key discovery or accomplishment in a single sentence”, according to a 2020 article in which she outlines ten simple steps to writing a scientific paper.

Keeping the main message in mind can get you past the feeling of being stuck, says Lynn Von Hagen, a conservation biologist at the Denver Zoo in Colorado. While writing a paper about human–elephant conflicts, published last year, she recognized that the most important point was that scientists need to engage communities when trying to understand complex conservation problems. She was then able to build each section around that idea. “A lot of times, scientific writing can be very rigorous,” Von Hagen says. “But one of the things you have to remember is that you’re still telling a story to the reader.”

Plan first

Inexperienced writers often jump right into new projects, says Silvia — leading them to forgo planning, scribble out the most obvious material right away and get stuck quickly. Developing a clear outline of a paper, chapter or book can help you to avoid that fate. There are many ways to create an outline, ranging from old-fashioned index cards or Post-it notes to software solutions.

Armani’s strategy begins with storyboarding figures, graphs, data sets and results on digital slides. She uses presentation programs — such as PowerPoint, Prezi or Keynote — that make it easy to move slides around. Soto Valero plans out each paragraph by writing series of questions in his document.

In a 2021 blog post about how he overcame writer’s block when working on research papers, Soto Valero gave an example of questions that guided his introduction for a study, published that year. The paper examined software bloat, a problem in which successive versions of computer programs become slower or use more memory. “What is software bloat? Why it is an issue?” he wrote, adding a written reminder to create a paragraph answering these questions. Next came: “What is the state-of-the-art of research on software bloat? What is missing?”

Writer’s block often results from paying attention to the end goal but not the steps required to get there, Armani says. Breaking the process down, she tells her students, mirrors what they do when they’re conducting research. “All of my PhD students have really well-developed and well-honed skills on experimental design and how to break up an experimental challenge into biteable chunks,” she says. “But then once they get near end of a project, and they’re like, ‘OK, so now I need to write this up and have a paper,’ it’s like they’re walking into a murky forest without a flashlight.”

Eliminate the blank page

Soto Valero started writing papers as a university student in Cuba, with the goal of earning a PhD abroad. Because English wasn’t his first language, writing in it was laborious. “It took hours to write every single sentence,” he says. Because it is always easier to revise text than to write from scratch, he tapped into a template-based strategy to boost his speed and confidence.

Using Google Scholar, a free academic search engine that indexes research papers, Soto Valero found examples of well-presented studies that he thought were explained clearly. He would create a similar structure, then iteratively paraphrase and reword the content, focusing on the insights and implications derived from his own data. He writes in English directly, but some of his colleagues use Google Translate to convert their Spanish into English. Some universities also hire proofreaders who check those translations.

For Von Hagen, the first step when it’s time to write is to get something, anything, down on the page, even if it is a disorganized stream of consciousness that lacks structure or even punctuation. Even just creating a rough list of ideas gives her a starting point that she doesn’t want to walk away from. “If you get it on paper, and you have something to work with, then you can just edit and revise, edit and revise,” she says. “If there’s nothing there, it’s one thing, but if there’s something there, then it’s like, ‘OK, now my juices are flowing, the writer’s block is at least gone, and then I can make something out of it from there.’”

Visualize

Using mental strategies can help, Soto Valero says. Before diving into each section of a paper, he likes to imagine that the writing is done, which makes the blank page seem less empty. “After seeing something done, at least mentally, it seems easier to achieve,” he wrote. Strategizing about how to tackle the components of the paper reminds him of planning moves in a chess game: “Imagine the next paragraph is done, make your move, and then write it!”

Write out of order

It might seem logical to first write the title, abstract and introduction, but this can lead to blocks and rewrites later, Armani says. “You don’t know what your results section is going to look like,” she says. If you start at the beginning, “you’re trying to introduce something that you haven’t written yet”.

After constructing a vision statement and making slides, Armani suggests writing the methods section first. You know what you did in the research, she says. “You can almost just dictate that and then clean up the text.” Next, she drafts the results section, followed by the discussion and conclusion, which generally summarize what she has already written. Finally, she writes the introduction and abstract and finishes with the title.

Starting with the easiest part prevents blinking-cursor syndrome — staring at a page decorated only by a blinking cursor, because you cannot start writing — says immunologist Daniela Weiskopf at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, California. “I want to start with something that I know I can do very well, like writing materials and methods,” says Weiskopf. “Then, you have one thing on your document” — and the thought of having to fill the page becomes less overwhelming.

Give yourself extra time

Because writing is hard work, it can help to build in a buffer, in case you need more time to meet a deadline than you’d originally planned. Armani advises her students to start writing when they’re about 75% of the way through the research. While doing her own work, Weiskopf makes notes of points that she might want to include in her paper.

For Soto Valero, having extra time allows him to take a day or two to do nothing related to the project, which can fuel enough guilt to motivate him to sit down and write. “It seems stupid, but it really, really works,” he says. “You need to go through the pain of writing. You cannot avoid it.”

Embrace collaboration

Getting feedback on a draft can help you to overcome writer’s block, Von Hagen says, especially if the collaborator is a mentor or peer with more experience of the publishing process. Constructive criticism is part of the learning process. “There have been times where I’ve felt like, ‘I’m just not sure where to go with it. I’m not sure it’s encapsulating what I’m really trying to get across,’” she says. “Having someone else look at the work can help you get past the block.”

Take the pressure off

Sometimes, writer’s block emerges from putting too much pressure on yourself to be eloquent or perfect on the first try. Armani recommends keeping your goal in mind: you aren’t trying to win a Pulitzer prize, but to provide clear and concise scientific communication.

“It’s not the time for compound complex sentences with introductory clauses, because you’re going to lose your audience. I tell my students: it’s a time to have a subject, a verb, maybe a direct object. But if you start having lots of dependent and independent clauses, nobody’s going to understand what you’re trying to say.”

It might get easier, but don’t expect it to get easy

Once you have a draft, Soto Valero says, you’ll have to do a lot of work over many iterations. “I have [spent] months writing papers,” he says. “It doesn’t come in one day or two.”

After writing more than 200 papers, Armani has improved her ability to get organized and start writing. But every paper has its challenges. “It’s still just as hard because you want to make sure that your intention is coming across in what the words are actually saying on the page,” she says. “You can’t rush that process.”

Know you’re not alone

Weiskopf tells students and postdocs that most people are “masters in practice” rather than born experts, and that writer’s block is not a unique experience. “It’s not just them who don’t know how to get over this,” she says. “It’s important to share your struggles because nobody wakes up and is a master in writing papers.”

Creating a small writing group can help you to build momentum and remember that you’re not alone, Silvia adds. He recommends holding a weekly check-in meeting with your group to discuss how work is going and share goals for the coming week. “Misery really does love company, and everyone struggles with their writing,” he says. “I have met so few people who think this is just natural and effortless.”

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June 13, 2024
Elite researchers in China say they had ‘no choice’ but to commit misconduct

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“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics¹.

The interviewer, sociologist Zhang Xinqu, and his colleague criminologist Wang Peng, both at the University of Hong Kong, suggest that researchers felt compelled, and even encouraged, to engage in misconduct to protect their jobs. This pressure, they conclude, ultimately came from a Chinese programme to create globally recognized universities. The programme prompted some Chinese institutions to set ambitious publishing targets, they say.

The article offers “a glimpse of the pain and guilt that researchers felt”, when they engaged in unethical behaviour, says Elisabeth Bik, a scientific-image sleuth and consultant in San Francisco, California.

But other researchers say the findings paint an overly negative picture of the Chinese programme. Zheng Wenwen, who is responsible for research integrity at the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, under the Ministry of Science and Technology, in Beijing, says that the sample size is too small to draw reliable conclusions. The study is based on interviews with staff at just three elite institutes — even though more than 140 institutions are now part of the programme to create internationally competitive universities and research disciplines.

Rankings a game

In 2015, the Chinese government introduced the Double First-Class Initiative to establish “world-class” universities and disciplines. Universities selected for inclusion in the programme receive extra funding, whereas those that perform poorly risk being delisted, says Wang.

Between May 2021 and April 2022, Zhang conducted anonymous virtual interviews with 30 faculty members and 5 students in the natural sciences at three of these elite universities. The interviewees included a president, deans and department heads. The researchers also analysed internal university documents.

The university decision-makers who were interviewed at all three institutes said they understood it to be their responsibility to interpret the goals of the Double First-Class scheme. They determined that, to remain on the programme, their universities needed to increase their standing in international rankings — and that, for that to happen, their researchers needed to publish more articles in international journals indexed in databases such as the Science Citation Index.

Some universities treated world university rankings as a “game” to win, says Wang.

As the directive moved down the institutional hierarchy, pressure to perform at those institutes increased. University departments set specific and hard-to-reach publishing criteria for academics to gain promotion and tenure.

Some researchers admitted to engaging in unethical research practices for fear of losing their jobs. In one interview, a faculty head said: “If anyone cannot meet the criteria [concerning publications], I suggest that they leave as soon as possible.”

Zhang and Wang describe researchers using services to write their papers for them, falsifying data, plagiarizing, exploiting students without offering authorship and bribing journal editors.

One interviewee admitted to paying for access to a data set. “I bought access to an official archive and altered the data to support my hypotheses.”

An associate dean emphasized the primacy of the publishing goal. “We should not be overly stringent in identifying and punishing research misconduct, as it hinders our scholars’ research efficiency.”

Not the whole picture

The authors “hit the nail on the head” in describing the relationship between institutional pressure and research misconduct, says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology.

But she says it’s not the whole picture. Incentives to publish high-quality research are part of broader reforms to the higher-education system that “have been largely positive”. “The article focuses almost exclusively on the negative aspects, potentially misleading readers into thinking that Chinese higher education reforms are severely flawed and accelerating research misconduct.”

Tang Li, a science- and innovation-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai, agrees. The first-hand accounts are valuable, but the findings could be biased, she says, because those who accepted the interview might have strong feelings and might not represent the opinions of those who declined to be interviewed.

Zheng disagrees with the study’s conclusions. In 2020, the government issued a directive for Double First-Class institutes. This states specifically that evaluations should be comprehensive, and not just focus on numbers of papers, she says. Research misconduct is a result not of the Double First-Class initiative, but of an “insufficient emphasis on research integrity education”, says Zheng.

Punishing misconduct

The larger problem, says Xiaotian Chen, a library and information scientist at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, is a lack of transparency and of systems to detect and deter misconduct in China. Most people do the right thing, despite the pressure to publish, says Chen, who has studied research misconduct in China. The pressure described in the paper could just be “an excuse to cheat”.

The Chinese government has introduced several measures to crack down on misconduct, including defining what constitutes violations and specifying appropriate penalties. They have also banned cash rewards for publishing in high-impact journals.

Wang Peng says that government policies need to be more specific about how they define and punish different types of misconduct.

But Zheng says that, compared with those that apply in other countries, “the measures currently taken by the Chinese government to punish research misconduct are already very stringent”.

The authors also ignore recent government guidance for elite Chinese institutions to break with the tendency of evaluating faculty members solely on the basis of their publications and academic titles, says Zheng.

Tang points out that the road to achieving integrity in research is long. “Cultivating research integrity takes time and requires orchestrated efforts from all stakeholders,” she says.

And the pressure to publish more papers to drive up university rankings “is not unique to China”, says Bik. “Whenever and wherever incentives and requirements are set up to make people produce more, there will be people ‘gaming the metrics’.”

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June 11, 2024
Open access is working — but researchers in lower-income countries enjoy fewer benefits

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Indonesia is among the low-income countries that have embraced open-access publishing, with more than 80% its research output being freely available.Credit: Donal Husni/NurPhoto via Getty

Open-access publishing can help to drive the flow of academic papers to and from researchers, especially those in resource-poor settings. But for scientists in low-income countries, power imbalances and a lack of visibility are making it harder for them to take full advantage of this access.

Calls to ensure that the open-access movement actually helps researchers in low-income countries — which often have a history of colonial occupation — have escalated after a study showed that these regions are not benefiting as much as they should.

The study, published in January¹, compared citations of open-access papers with those of non-open access papers to show how making research freely available can affect how widely it’s read around the world.

“It was important to put some real effort into proving the benefits that we are claiming for open access,” says study co-author Cameron Neylon, who studies research communications at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Nature Index 2023 annual tables

Neylon and his colleagues examined 420 million citations over the period 2010–19 for 19 million research outputs and found that the open-access papers garnered more citations than non-open-access ones did. For example, open-access papers that were published in 2010 had an average of 44 citations each, compared with 28 each for non-open access articles from that year. Furthermore, open-access papers were cited by authors in a more diverse set of countries and disciplines.

Among all open-access articles examined, those that were made available through a platform other than the publisher, such as a repository on a university website (classified as green open access) had the most citations.

Researchers in low-income countries received relatively few extra citations from making their papers open access, says Neylon. Authors in Northern Europe were found to get the biggest boost, whereas those from African countries got among the smallest.

The results reveal that, although the proliferation of open access has enabled wider dissemination of findings, more research is needed to determine whether authors in low-income countries are actually benefiting from the increased availability.

Open access from and to low-income countries

The past decade has seen rapid progress in open-access publishing. Almost half of the world’s research output in 2020 is now available to be read or downloaded without payment, according to the Global State of Open Access 2021 report, which draws on data from several bibliometric services². Those advocating for open access often argue that there is a moral obligation for researchers to share knowledge with their peers in countries that do not have the funds to cover access fees.

Open access also plays a part in improving the flow of research from poorer countries to the rest of the world.

Four global-south researchers making cross-border collaborations count

Many low-income countries have extensive open-access-publishing infrastructure for researchers to share their work with others. Governments of several Latin American nations have funded open-access journals since the late 1990s, and more recently, a surge in local open-access journals and publishing portals in Indonesia has led to more than 80% of the country’s research output being freely available.

Susan Murray, who leads African Journals OnLine, a bibliographic database of African-published peer-reviewed research based in Grahamstown, South Africa, says that there are now thousands of open-access journals based in low-income countries. But without changing some of the more entrenched aspects of local research systems, the full benefits of open access for researchers in low-income countries might not be realized, she says. Murray notes that those researchers are often more affected by power and resource inequalities than their counterparts in high-income countries — a problem that local incentives and rewards systems can exacerbate.

Another issue is that scientists in low-income countries might choose to focus on research topics that are of interest to editors of prestigious journals based in wealthy nations, in an attempt to advance their career, which further skews the research agenda. It also undermines the knowledge-sharing systems that exist in low-income countries and could prevent strong, relevant research from being distributed to those who need it.

“It is important to change this,” says Murray, to ensure that the research agendas of low-income countries focus attention on their needs, challenges, priorities and interests, such as climate change, malnutrition and infectious diseases. “Without research in, for and from these countries — along with channels to readership of the outputs — these problems will persist,” she says.

Greater support from high-income countries

The challenge for organizations that run low-cost options — such as journals and platforms that do not charge author or reader fees — is that they tend to be centrally funded or run by volunteer work, says Elizabeth Marincola, an open-science adviser to the Science for Africa Foundation in Nairobi. “It is hard to maintain editorial and peer-review consistency and speed using this model,” she says. But the fact that they are gaining traction is positive for low-income countries, she adds.

North–south country collaborations reveal untapped potential

Speed is an important factor in ensuring that research from low-income nations is more widely read, because if the quality of work is consistent, the faster it is published and the more citations it gets, says Marincola. This is particularly true in the life sciences, she adds, in which research tends to move quickly.

A major policy change by one of the world’s largest funders for research in low-income countries could lead to reports being shared faster. In April, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, announced changes to its open-access publishing requirements, including a requirement, from 2025 onwards, for grant recipients to post their manuscripts on an open-access preprint server. The organization will also no longer fund article-processing charges (APCs) for articles to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

There are also emerging reports from South America and Indonesia that suggest that some open-access journals are discussing the introduction of APCs. This is troubling because these fees are inequitable, says Juan Pablo Alperin, who studies publishing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and he questions how important the citation advantage is for researchers.

“APCs can appear as an attractive solution for individual journals, but their proliferation will ultimately defund the vibrant and diverse publisher and reader fee-free open-access ecosystem in the global south,” says Alperin. “With limited funds, institutions that are currently supporting publishing programmes will divert resources to ever-growing APCs, with devastating consequences for local publishing capacity.”

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June 11, 2024
China’s research clout leads to growth in homegrown science publishing

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Over the past two decades, China has risen to become the world’s largest producer of scientific knowledge. According to Digital Science’s Dimensions database, last year there were almost 830,000 papers featuring researchers based in China, representing around 15% of the world’s 5.4 million articles. In 2022, the country overtook the United States in the Nature Index for contributions to natural-sciences articles for the first time. The majority of this research was disseminated in journals published by companies based in Western countries, rather than China’s own domestic publishers. The biggest 20 international publishers by output published 83% of all research articles involving authors based in China from 2012 to 2021.

“China’s journals are generally not that high-profile, so Chinese researchers tend to publish in international journals,” says Nicko Goncharoff, managing director of the London-based company Osmanthus Consulting. Goncharoff co-authored a 2023 report on the scientific-publishing market in China.

Nature Index 2024 China

China is making efforts to reverse that trend by launching several initiatives to build its portfolio of domestic academic journals. Those changes, albeit slow, could not only transform China’s publishing sector, but also have major effects on how international scientific collaboration is conducted and communicated.

Part of the motivation for this is economic. China spends more than US$1 billion on scientific publishing each year, and that expenditure is growing fast, with the rise of ‘gold’ open-access publishing models, in which authors are charged article processing charges (APCs) by a journal to get their papers published. APC spending in China has increased, on average, by 25% per year from 2017 to 2020. Around 90% of that money went to international publishers. “China is looking for a way to capture a portion of that APC spend that is currently going to international publishers,” says Goncharoff.

But Lili Yang, a higher-education researcher at the University of Hong Kong, says China is also motivated by a desire to move away from Western-dominated agendas in science and encourage more research that better serves the country’s needs. “To meet [international journals’] expectations, our research might not directly tackle local issues and topics,” she says. So, the Chinese government and the country’s research institutions hope domestic journals can help researchers “connect with local communities and domestic issues better”.

Beyond that, China wants to become more active in helping to shape how the global academic-publishing system works, and not always be following models and rules set up by Western countries, she says.

Journal plans

Reforming China’s fragmented publishing sector will be a major undertaking. In 2020, the latest year for which data are available, 4,963 journals were published by 4,261 publishers, 96% of which publish a single journal. Just 375 of those journals are English-language and 184 are in English and Chinese. Of these, just a handful have any international impact, says Goncharoff.

Most efforts at developing domestic publishers have had modest success. The most recent initiative, and most consistently funded and supported, is the China Journal Excellence Action Plan (CJEAP). Launched by the government in 2019, the CJEAP is a five-year plan that aims to create a portfolio of 400 world-class journals owned by Chinese institutions. The first tranche of 285 journals was announced in late 2019, with funding of 205 million yuan (US$29 million). Another 30 journals were announced in July 2020 and September 2021, and a further 50 in September 2022. The plan includes extra support such as a digital publishing platform and a training programme to develop local publishing and editorial talent.

Source: Nature Index

Being selected for support under the CJEAP is not easy, says Shu Fei, who studies scholarly communication at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China. “It requires an ambitious plan for improvement, and to be indexed in the Web of Science within three years,” he says. That indexing can be difficult to attain if the journal is not affiliated with a top university or the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country’s largest research institution, in Beijing. One journal Shu is involved with, which he helped launch in 2021, has so far been unsuccessful in its attempts to become part of the CJEAP, he says.

Indexing in the Web of Science, a database of research publications owned by US firm Clarivate, is seen as a mark of quality for journals in China, says Shu. “If you’re not indexed, you have no attraction for Chinese scientists,” he says. Only 2–3% of journals in the index are published in China, so increasing that presence is a major goal of the Chinese government, says Shu.

So far, China has kept to its schedule of selecting new journals for the CJEAP, but progress on improving quality and impact has been intermittent, says Goncharoff. However, “once they put their mind to something, sooner or later, it gets done”.

One way for journals to kick-start their growth under the CJEAP is to partner with international publishers, a practice that is common for Chinese journals that are seeking more global impact. Because of the relative lack of publishing expertise within China, most of the country’s English-language journals are published in partnership with international publishers, which provides Chinese institutions with access to technology and expertise. The Chinese partner, usually a research institute or university, retains copyright and editorial control, and the foreign publisher gets to maintain a foothold in the country, says Goncharoff. Between them, the major publishers, Springer Nature and Elsevier, publish more than 200 China-based journals. (Nature Index’s news and supplement content is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)

The CJEAP is not the only tool that China has to develop its domestic publishing system. The government can also use its influence to dictate where researchers publish, says Goncharoff. Over the past five years or so, the country has been working to reform its research assessment and academic promotion systems, moving away from rewarding scientists on the number of papers they publish to a more nuanced evaluation based on quality that is similar to those used in many other countries, says Yang. According to Goncharoff’s report, researchers focused on basic science are now assessed on ‘representative works’, of which at least one-third must be published in domestic journals with international influence, with the rest published in top international journals or presented at major international conferences. “They are trying to encourage more Chinese publications,” says Yang.

Many Chinese funders, research institutes and universities maintain lists of preferred journals and ‘warning lists’ of ones to avoid. As these directly reflect the wishes of the government and the researchers’ employers, these lists have a big influence on where scientists publish and the publications to which libraries subscribe.

Source: Dimensions

“These lists are very important,” says Yang. When assessing researchers for promotion, “universities will often have specific requirements” for how many publications were in journals deemed to be of a higher level, she says. “So, to meet that bar you need to benchmark against the preferred lists.”

One particularly influential list is the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Early Warning List, which aims to identify journals that are viewed as having poor management, a lower academic reputation or favouring commercial interests. Launched at the end of 2020, the list evaluates journals based on a number of criteria that have included self-citation rates, retraction rates, the cost of APCs and, most recently in 2024, citation manipulation. The first iteration of the list included 65 journals; the 2024 version had just 24, with only two remaining from the original list.

Yang says Chinese universities pay close attention to the Early Warning List, and papers in listed journals risk not being counted for assessment and promotion, or worse, can damage an author’s academic reputation. This has had a major impact on the journals, with some seeing submissions from China decline by as much as 70% within six months of being listed, as well as an increased number of requests to retract submissions and China-based editors stepping down from editorial boards.

Access issues

One aspect of publishing that China seems less interested in pursuing is open access. The country produces hundreds of thousands of open-access articles each year, and the total is growing fast, but as a proportion of all research output, it remains lower than the rest of the world: just under half of China’s 2022 articles were open access, according to data from Dimensions, compared with 65% for non-China papers. There are only around 178 English-language open-access journals published in China, just 0.9% of the total registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals — although this does not include all of the journals that are co-published by Chinese and international organizations.

Although the Chinese government and many leading institutions officially support open access, they remain suspicious of it, says Goncharoff, especially the trend towards gold open access. “China is quite resistant to gold open access. They see it as a Western business model that is being foisted on them,” he says. The gold model could be costly for China. Goncharoff estimates that if most publishing shifts to gold open access, China might have to spend three to four times more on APCs than it does now, even with some declines in subscription costs.

In an effort to control rising costs, there has been much discussion in China of what ‘reasonable’ APCs would be. There is funding available for Chinese researchers to pay APCs, but if the cost exceeds about US$2,800, it must be reviewed by an academic committee. Some universities have started rejecting any APC above US$2,000, and there are suggestions that a reasonable APC is around US$1,200.

Chinese universities talk about making transformative agreements, which are designed to gradually shift publishers from subscription to open-access models, cost neutral. This could seriously hit the profits of international publishers because many Chinese institutions have already been able to negotiate deep discounts on subscriptions, says Goncharoff.

Source: Dimensions

Given the reticence around open access, neither Goncharoff nor Yang expect China to introduce a national policy on it anytime soon. But the country is pragmatic about the direction of travel in global publishing, says Goncharoff. Every journal supported by the CJEAP offers open-access options — some gold, but many diamond, where the costs are covered by a publisher or a sponsoring institution.

It is not clear whether, or how, China’s efforts to boost domestic journals will affect international scientific collaboration. It will probably play out differently according to the type of Chinese institution, says Simon Marginson, a higher-education researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. Big universities with strong ties to the rest of the world will likely maintain links and keep publishing in major international journals, but smaller institutions with fewer connections might become less concerned with pursuing international publications, he says. The goal of building up domestic journals is not just to capture the output of China’s own scientists. “The goal is to attract a global author base and build a world-class portfolio of journals that is used by the global research community,” says Goncharoff.

Some of China’s strongest Chinese-language journals in the field of education studies are establishing English versions and are inviting global scholars to join their editorial board, says Yang. “They’re not just for Chinese authors, they want to be properly international.”

Many Western scientists might be hesitant to publish in Chinese journals, says Goncharoff. Worries about political interference and policies in their own countries that discourage certain kinds of collaboration with China have cooled cooperation. But, says Marginson, China increasingly has a great deal of influence at the global level, especially in emerging economies such as those involved in its Belt and Road global trade initiative. Scientists from those countries might be more willing to publish in their Chinese partners’ preferred journals, he says. This might especially be the case if Chinese partners are making the biggest financial contribution to the project.

Although changes to China’s domestic publishing landscape will take time, it is a process that can’t be ignored by researchers and publishers elsewhere. “China is a big ship that takes a lot of time to turn, but when they do, they go all the way around and completely reorient,” says Marginson. “If they want to” grow their science-publishing capacity, he adds, “it will happen”.

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June 5, 2024
Chinese research collaborations shift to the Belt and Road

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Although China is expanding its international research collaborations rapidly, the composition of these interactions is shifting, according to data from the Nature Index. Specifically, China’s researchers are increasingly working with scientists in countries taking part in the Beijing government’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI is often described as a modern-day reboot of the Silk Road, an ancient system of trade routes that connected China’s heartland with the eastern edge of Europe. Officially, the BRI is a bid to strengthen the resilience of China’s trade networks, both overland — across Asia into the Middle East and Africa — and by sea — upgrading ports and building maritime fuelling stations throughout the Asian continent.

Nature Index 2024 China

In reality it is about far more than just infrastructure. Sometimes referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature policy, it’s an attempt to boost China’s economic and political influence by strengthening its ties with neighbours and other strategic partners around the world. The Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University in Shanghai has been keeping track of the BRI’s progress. It estimates that China has spent more than US$1 trillion on the initiative since 2013 and that 151 countries have so far signed up to the project and the funding that comes with it.

In science, the BRI has spearheaded a range of initiatives, from Chinese researchers helping to design key pieces of infrastructure in Africa, to countries in central Asia working with China on lunar-exploration plans. Data trends in the Nature Index seem to reflect this. The number of natural-sciences research papers involving China and at least one BRI country has risen by 132% between 2015 and 2023 (data for 2023 are approximated by a 12-month window from August 2022 to July 2023). Such articles accounted for 28% of all of China’s international collaboration in the index in 2023, up from 22% in 2015. At the same time, the overall number of internationally collaborative papers involving China has increased at a slower rate — growing by 83% in the same time period. Collaborative research output with the United States in the natural sciences, measured by bilateral collaboration score (CS), decreased by 15% between 2020 and 2022 — and it has stagnated since then. The data suggest that researchers in China are starting to favour working with countries that are closer to home or deemed to be strategically important by the central government, over others, particularly in the West.

Source: Nature Index

“I’m not at all surprised,” says Caroline Wagner, a researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus who specializes in public policy that relates to science and innovation. “I did a study for the US state department, looking at all of the diplomatic agreements that China has made on science and tech with different countries, and we could see a tremendous rise [in BRI collaborations].”

Of the collaborations between China and BRI countries in the Nature Index, Singapore and South Korea come out on top. Singapore is China’s fifth largest research partner on papers in the database overall, including health sciences, with its bilateral CS rising by 8.4% between 2022 and 2023. These changes are likely to have been driven from the bottom up, says Jenny Lee, a science-policy researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It’s not like the Chinese Communist Party is saying to Chinese researchers that they must collaborate with these countries,” she says. Part of what the data are showing could also stem from China’s COVID-19 policy, which involved strict lockdowns and closed borders. “People didn’t go abroad to make connections at conferences during that time and it could just be that people in China are only just starting to do that again,” says Lee. Chinese scientists might still be wary of travelling farther afield to the United States and Europe, she says, and they might prefer to stay closer to home.

Part of the growth in China–BRI research collaborations could be explained by quirks in how academics identify themselves on research papers, says Robert Tijssen, a science and innovation studies researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “A growing number of ‘cosmopolitan’ academic researchers have multiple institutional affiliations in different countries, especially countries that share a language or a common research culture. This may apply to China and Singapore,” he says. On papers, that could look like international collaboration when it’s more like Chinese researchers working with Chinese researchers.

Source: Nature Index

China’s domestic research collaborations are also skyrocketing: the number of natural-science papers in the Nature Index authored solely by China-based researchers grew by 194% between 2015 and 2023. The implication, says Lee, is that US hegemony as the ‘go-to place’ for researchers around the world is in peril. “It’s yet another demonstration of how global science is shifting away from the West. International collaboration will continue to grow,” she says, but it “may be shifting to a more regionalized model”.

Part of this is driven by geopolitics, she adds. Several countries, including the United Kingdom and United States, have banned Chinese firms such as Huawei from engaging in projects that involve key technology or infrastructure, such as telecommunications and electrical grids. The European Union is considering similar policies. That has a knock-on effect; researchers in China who are interested in working in these areas don’t change fields — they look for collaborators in other countries.

“You can’t collaborate with Chinese nationals if you have NASA funding” in the United States, says Lee. “When we look at sensitive areas of research, or anything to do with national security, the United States is closing access to data and resources. I suspect that this is probably where this trend away from the West is happening. These are areas and fields that are growing in Singapore and South Korea, so it makes sense.”

This article is part of Nature Index 2024 China, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

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June 5, 2024
Chinese science still has room to grow

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Strong potential

Chemistry and physical sciences are clear areas of focus for China, accounting for 85% of the country’s total Share in the Nature Index in 2023*. But output in other subjects is growing fast. China’s adjusted Share in biological sciences increased by 15.8% from 2022 to 2023* — the highest percentage among the four natural-sciences subjects shown below.

Source: Nature Index. Analysis by Bo Wu. Infographic by Simon Baker, Bec Crew and Tanner Maxwell

Topic trends

The top fields of research (FORs) in each of the five subjects tracked by Nature Index are shown. The most dominant FORs across the respective areas are biochemistry and cell biology, at 36% of biological-sciences output, and materials engineering, which represents 34.7% of physical-sciences output. FORs can relate to more than one subject: biochemistry and cell biology is also among the top five FORs for health sciences, for instance.

Source: Nature Index. Analysis by Bo Wu. Infographic by Simon Baker, Bec Crew and Tanner Maxwell

Looking outwards

China’s areas of relative weakness have the highest percentage of internationally collaborative papers. For most subject areas, China’s international-article percentage was lower than every other leading country in the Nature Index in 2023*. In biological sciences, however, it is 54.1%, a higher proportion than the United States (52.7%).

Source: Nature Index. Analysis by Bo Wu. Infographic by Simon Baker, Bec Crew and Tanner Maxwell

Strength in numbers

China might be more outward-looking in its approach to biological sciences research, but it still dominates its top three international partnerships in the subject. A different dynamic can be seen in its collaboration with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has more than double the collaboration score (6.39) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing (3.02), in the fourth-ranked international partnership in the subject (not shown).

Source: Nature Index. Analysis by Bo Wu. Infographic by Simon Baker, Bec Crew and Tanner Maxwell

Concentrated expertise

It’s perhaps no surprise that China’s largest research institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, forms five of the country’s ten leading international partnerships in biological sciences. What is striking is the strength of the University of Hong Kong — a much smaller institution — which forms the top three international health-sciences collaborations. Among China’s top international collaborations in health sciences and biology, the University of Sydney is the only institution from outside Europe and the United States.

Source: Nature Index. Analysis by Bo Wu. Infographic by Simon Baker, Bec Crew and Tanner Maxwell

This article is part of Nature Index 2024 China, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

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June 5, 2024
China seeks global impact and recognition

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Workers at the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory.Credit: Qiu Xinsheng/VCG via Getty

China’s new-found position at the summit of the Nature Index in 2023 represented a major — if not unexpected — turning point. A year after overtaking the United States for contributions to natural-science journals tracked by the database, there seems to be no indication that China’s trajectory in scientific performance is plateauing. The gap between China and the United States in natural sciences has already grown, representing a Share of almost 5,000 in the 12 months from August 2022 to July 2023. China is also now ahead in the Nature Index overall, even when including newly added data from health-sciences journals (a subject in which the United States still has a substantial lead).

Nature Index 2024 China

The key question is where Chinese research will go next. The country’s growing assortment of large-scale science facilities demonstrates its ambition and hints at a desire for worldwide impact and recognition. In the fast-evolving world of academic publishing, China now has the potential to shape the direction of travel, with the future of open science partially dependent on how the country believes new research is best disseminated. And through its increasing willingness to collaborate with developing nations, there are signs that China might mould a scientific ecosystem that moves the centre of gravity away from the West.

There are concerns that some of these developments might lead to parallel systems, with international research collaboration — already dented — becoming fragmented. But this does not need to be the case. Challenging established norms has the potential to benefit research across the globe. And provided collaborative networks are kept open, China’s contribution to high-quality research will help to push the frontiers of discovery in a multitude of areas.

This article is part of Nature Index 2024 China, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

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June 5, 2024
Biomedical paper retractions have quadrupled in 20 years — why?

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Retraction rates in European biomedical science papers have quadrupled since 2000.Credit: bagi1998/Getty

The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers increased fourfold between 2000 and 2021, a study of thousands of retractions has found.

Two-thirds of these papers were withdrawn for reasons relating to research misconduct, such as data and image manipulation or authorship fraud. These factors accounted for an increasing proportion of retractions over the roughly 20-year period, the analysis suggests.

“Our findings indicate that research misconduct has become more prevalent in Europe over the last two decades,” write the authors, led by Alberto Ruano‐Ravina, a public-health researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Other research-integrity specialists point out that retractions could be on the rise because researchers and publishers are getting better at investigating and identifying potential misconduct. There are more people working to spot errors and new digital tools to screen publications for suspicious text or data.

Rising retractions

Scholarly publishers have faced increased pressure to clear up the literature in recent years as sleuths have exposed cases of research fraud, identified when peer review has been compromised and uncovered the buying and selling of research articles. Last year saw a record 10,000 papers retracted. Although misconduct is a leading cause of retractions, it is not always responsible: some papers are retracted when authors discover honest errors in their work.

More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record

The latest research, published on 4 May in Scientometrics¹, looked at more than 2,000 biomedical papers that had a corresponding author based at a European institution and were retracted between 2000 and mid-2021. The data included original articles, reviews, case reports and letters published in English, Spanish or Portuguese. They were listed in a database collated by the media organization Retraction Watch, which records why papers are retracted.

The authors found that overall retraction rates quadrupled during the study period — from around 11 retractions per 100,000 papers in 2000 to almost 45 per 100,000 in 2020. Of all the retracted papers, nearly 67% were withdrawn due to misconduct and around 16% for honest errors. The remaining retractions did not give a reason.

Looking at the papers retracted for misconduct specifically, Ruano‐Ravina and his colleagues found that the major causes have changed over time. In 2000, the highest proportions of retractions were attributed to ethical and legal problems, authorship issues — including dubious or false authorships, objections to authorship by institutions and lack of author approval — and duplication of images, data or large passages of text. By 2020, duplication was still one of the top reasons for retraction, but a similar proportion of papers was retracted owing to ‘unreliable data’ (see ‘Misconduct retractions’).

Source: Ref 1

‘Unreliable data’ refers to studies that cannot be trusted for reasons including original data not being provided and problems with bias or lack of balance. The authors suggest that the rise in retractions attributable to this cause could be related to an increase in the number of papers suspected to be produced by paper mills, businesses that generate fake or poor-quality papers to order.

Authorship problems fell to the joint fifth reason for retractions in 2020. This is “possibly due to the implementation of authorship control systems and increased researcher awareness”, write Ruano‐Ravina and colleagues.

International variation

The study also identified the four European countries that had the highest number of retracted biomedical science papers: Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. Each had distinct ‘profiles’ of misconduct-related retractions. In the United Kingdom, for example, falsification was the top reason given for retractions in most years, but the proportion of papers withdrawn because of duplication fell between 2000 and 2020. Meanwhile, Spain and Italy both saw huge rises in the proportion of papers retracted because of duplication.

Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, contributed to work that in 2012 found similar rates of paper withdrawal for misconduct². “To me, this argues that the underlying problems in science have not changed appreciably in the past 12 years,” he says.

But the overall increase in retraction rates could reflect the fact that authors, institutions and journals are increasingly using retractions to correct the literature, he adds.

Science’s fake-paper problem: high-profile effort will tackle paper mills

Sholto David, a biologist and research-integrity specialist based in Wales, UK, points out that methods for detecting errors in research improved during the 20-year study period. An increasing number of people now scan the literature and point out flaws, which could help to explain increasing retraction rates, he says. In particular, the launch of the post-publication peer-review website PubPeer in 2012 has offered sleuths the opportunity to scrutinize papers en masse, he adds, and it has become much more common for researchers to send whistle-blowing e-mails to journals.

Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch’s co-founder who is based in New York City, suggests that the routine use of plagiarism-detection software by publishers during the past decade might have contributed to the rising rates of retraction because of plagiarism and duplication. It remains to be seen how more recent digital tools, such as those that detect image manipulation, could affect paper withdrawal rates in the coming years, he adds.

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May 31, 2024
Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape

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Japan plans to make all publicly funded research available to read in institutional repositories.Credit: Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty

The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. This month, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025.

The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration”, says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.

Institutional repositories

When the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced Japan’s pivot to OA in February, it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

Among the roughly 800 universities in Japan, more than 750 already have an institutional repository, says Shimasaki Seiichi, director of the Office for Nuclear Fuel Cycles and Decommissioning at MEXT in Tokyo, who was involved with drawing up the plan. Each university will host the research produced by its academics, but the underlying software will be the same.

In 2022, Japan also launched its own national preprint server, Jxiv, but its use remains limited with only the few hundred preprint articles posted on the platform to date. Ide says that publishing as preprints is not yet habitual among many researchers in Japan, noting that only around one in five respondents to his 2023 survey¹ on Jxiv were even aware that it existed.

Green OA

Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on ‘green OA’ — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi.

Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities. Publishers levy an article-processing charge (APC) if the paper is made free to read, rather than being paywalled, a fee that covers a publisher’s costs.

APCs are increasing at an average rate of 4.3% per year, notes Johan Rooryck, a scholar of French linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and executive director of cOAlition S.

Rooryck says that Japan’s green OA strategy should be applauded. “It’s definitely something that one should do,” he says. “Especially for all the content that is still behind the paywall.”

Kathleen Shearer, executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories in Montreal, Canada, says that the Japanese plan is “equitable”.

“It doesn’t matter where you publish, whether you have APCs or not, you are still able to comply with an open-access policy,” she says.

She adds that the policy will mean that Japan has a unified record of all research produced by its academics because all institutional repositories are hosted on the same national server. “Japan is way ahead of the rest of us,” Shearer says. “More countries are moving in this direction but Japan really was one of the first.”

Focusing on institutional repositories will have another benefit: it will not discriminate against research published in Japanese, Shearer says. “A big part of their scholarly ecosystem is represented in Japanese.”

Japanese research is no longer world class — here’s why

The plan to move to OA and support Japanese universities’ repositories comes as Japan grapples with its declining standing in international research.

In a report released last October, MEXT found that Japan’s world-class research status is declining. For instance, Japan’s share in the top 10% of most-cited papers has dipped from 6% to 2%, placing it 13th on the list of nations, despite Japan having the fifth-highest research output.

In March, Japan also vowed to triple its number of doctorate holders by 2040, after another report found that the country’s number of PhD graduates is also declining, making it an outlier among the major economies.

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May 30, 2024
I’m worried I’ve been contacted by a predatory publisher — how do I find out?

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Illustration: David Parkins

The problem

Dear Nature,

I’m a microbial ecologist in South Africa. I recently received a flattering e-mail from a publisher, inviting me to submit a paper to one of its journals on a topic that’s tangentially related to my field of study. I’m concerned that the journal is predatory, but I’m not sure how to check. The journal’s website looks professional, and the editorial board features some familiar researchers in my field. However, the review process seems unusually short, and the publisher emphasized its processing fees in the e-mail. How do I determine whether this journal is predatory or not? — Sincerely, a suspicious ecologist

The advice

Nature reached out to two researchers for advice. Predatory journals claim to be legitimate scholarly publications, but exploit the open-access publication model to deceive authors into paying them a fee. These publishers often lie about the journal’s impact factor, misrepresent their editorial board and falsely claim that they provide a peer-review process¹.

Predatory journals: no definition, no defence

One of the first things you can do to determine whether a journal is predatory or not is to evaluate the e-mail invitation critically, which it seems you’ve already done. “Predatory journals approach so many of us here in Africa. Every day, I get like 20 e-mails asking me to publish something,” says Alexander Kwarteng, a microbiologist at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. For Kwarteng, an emphasis on publication fees in the e-mail is a red flag. “Most predatory journals like talking about money. They will ask you to send them US$50 or $100 to publish your paper in two weeks.”

“Some journals are obviously predatory, because the topic is fully off from your field of study,” says Jeroen Groeneveld, a palaeoceanographer at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. “Also, these e-mails are often extremely flattering. They’ll include phrases like ‘dearest professor’ and ‘your extremely high standing in the scientific community’. Those are red flags for me.”

Looking for typos, grammatical errors and whether the timestamp of the e-mail matches the standard working hours for the publisher’s purported location can also help to indicate whether a journal is predatory or not, write Susan Elmore and Eleanor Weston in a 2020 publication on how to avoid predatory journals¹. The e-mail you received seems to have many of these characteristics, suggesting that it might be from a predatory publisher.

Share your own career problems anonymously

After closely reviewing the e-mail, the researchers we spoke to also recommend looking at the journal’s website to evaluate its credibility. For instance, does the journal have clear guidelines for its peer-review process and timeline? “A journal that promises to accept your manuscript within a week’s time for money is, for me, predatory, as this is simply not possible,” says Groeneveld, who notes that a thorough peer-review and editing process take weeks, if not months or even a year.

Kwarteng also looks at the journal’s citation index, address and telephone numbers. “If a journal says it’s coming from the United States, but the telephone number is from India, that doesn’t make sense,” he says. He also checks out the members of the editorial team and tries to follow the links in their biographies. “Sometimes you click a link that doesn’t go anywhere. That tells me they’re probably a dangerous publisher.” Consider e-mailing the people included on the journal’s editorial board to ask them about the journal. If it turns out to be predatory, then you’ve helped inform these researchers that their information is probably being used deceitfully.

Beyond exploring the website, an online search can provide insights into whether a journal is predatory or not. Groeneveld often searches the journal name with the keyword ‘predatory’ to see what pops up. He also checks Beall’s list, a compilation of potential predatory journals and publishers originally created by librarian Jeffrey Beall, who at the time was employed by the University of Colorado Denver.

Hundreds of ‘predatory’ journals indexed on leading scholarly database

In their paper, Elmore and Weston suggest numerous free resources that can help researchers to identify predatory journals. Examples include databases curated by the Directory for Open Access Journals and SCImago Journal Rank, and guidance provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics. They also recommend using a guide for checking journal quality on the non-profit website thinkchecksubmit.org.

On the basis of these criteria, Nature reviewed the e-mail received by the suspicious ecologist and found that it probably is from a predatory publisher.

Kwarteng and Groeneveld both noted that working out whether a journal is predatory or not can be particularly challenging for early-career researchers, who are often not very familiar with scientific publishers. In those cases, it’s best to reach out to more experienced colleagues for help.

In 2021, a graduate student in Kwarteng’s lab was tricked into publishing their work in a predatory journal. Despite numerous requests for the journal to withdraw the publication, it refuses to do so and continues to ask Kwarteng for money. “I’ve learnt a hard lesson,” says Kwarteng. “We need to continuously educate members of the lab in how to deal with some of these predatory publishers. The truth is, they’re all over the place.”

This is part of a series in Nature in which we share advice on career issues faced by readers. Have a problem? E-mail us at [email protected]

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May 15, 2024