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Brazilian Journals' Self-Citation Cartel Smashed
ananyo writes "Thomson Reuters has uncovered a Brazilian self-citation cartel in which editors of journals cited each other to boost their impact factors. The cartel grew out of frustration with the system for evaluating graduate programs, which places too much emphasis on publishing in 'top tier' journals, one of the editors claims. As emerging Brazilian journals are in the lowest ranks, few graduates want to publish in them. This vicious cycle, in his view, prevents local journals improving. Both the Brazilian education ministry and Thomson Reuters have censured the journals. The ministry says articles from the journals published in 2012-12 will not count in any future assessment, and Thomson Reuters has suspended their impact factors."
...and my first thought was: Wow! How many zeros in a brazillion?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Metrics influence journals more than journals influence metrics.
Tier 1 journals do the same. It is open secret that you are more likely to get published if you heavily citing papers from the journal.
Impact factors, publish or perish, and pay walled articles means that a lot of shoddy "science" is going on out of public's eye. In a small field you are not going to rock the boat when your college is pushing out questionable papers. Sure, if you get selected to review the paper you can push back, but then you get to known by editors as "difficult one" and excluded in the future. Back when I worked in science more than half papers were unreproducible, meaning they collected data until significance then wrote paper around it.
More = Better mentality has to go. We do not push boundary of our knowledge by verbiage and fishing expeditions.
Science publishing is totally broken. Brazilians were just emulating the behavior of western Europe, China, and North America. The only difference is that we have practised this stupid game for much longer and we are better at not getting caught.
When you read TFA, you might notice that 14 journals were suspendend - four of them are from Brasil. So keep your crap to yourself.
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Well, it takes much more work, but would have worked a lot better if editors focused on paper quality instead. Doing a good review (a review which really helps the authors to improve the quality of their research) is a lot of hard work. I still don't understand why mostly it's unpaid. They could go as far as paying the reviewers proportionally to the number of (real) citations, obtained by the reviewed paper, in two years after the publication. That would really encourage doing good reviews, and helping the authors.
The system is broken, but few people outside university realize how badly it is broken. I did some reviews, but I prefer to not, because there is no reward, and my time is better spent on actual research. Also it happened to me once, that I recommended rejecting a paper and I worked hard to write a good review, and the paper was published nevertheless with only few things corrected. How that journal expects to have a high citation rate is beyond me. Yes I understand that the reviewers work is for free and for the sake of humanity, but the level to which it is exploited by journals is just outrageous. I feel much better developing open source software, which is also done for free and for the sake of humanity, becuase nobody exploits me doing this.
This cartel is not the only one. And more of this will happen in near future until some kind of revolution will take place. Moving toward open access is a good direction and I hope that it will take part in revolutionizing the pulication mechanisms.
Oh well, I hope that more scandalous things like this one will resurface, which will tell people that a reform is needed. And maybe something that encourages quality and not cheating will be discovered....
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Back when I worked in science in my field it took about 2mil to conduct a study, with another 10 mil in infrastructure costs. I am sure it costs even more now. This is very much outside third-world budget range. Does all this tech gadgetry help design better studies? Absolutely, but you don't have to have latest and greatest to do interesting work. Unfortunately Tier 1 journals don't see it this way, if you don't have X $toy$ in your lab, you might as well not submit manuscripts. Also if you are the first to get new expensive tech you can publish low hanging fruit (validation plus comparison to old tech) and all but guarantee no-effort papers. So arm race to spend on new gadgetry is always there.
Is everything in south america called a cartel now?
Link farms in meatspace.
Perhaps these are the cost to post to tier 1 journals. But in my experience it came down to finding the people who really were invested and excited in the research. (And professors who were excited about mentoring ) And the institutions that had the leadership that could see the benefits of, and be willing to employ programmers to create the simulations and programs, not costly infrastructure, then amazing studies and wonderful papers were produced for next to nothing.
Do you have any evidence to back this claim up whatsoever?
Having published in top journals no reviewer or editor ever asked whether the measurements were done on a homegrown 30k or commercial 300k machine. Everybody was scrutinizing the science intensively. The problem is more that a PhD student can only do so much. If I would have spend years building up a homegrown machine for 30k I would not have the time to do much science. Having the luxury of a mostly commercial machine I could just work on the actual measurements and analysis. So while money helps it is not the only factor. More important were collaborations, experienced people working on a project, being able to talk to experts from other groups.
So your claim is not backed up by my personal experience at all.
Please read TFA. TFS makes it look like a problem in Brazil when in fact it is a lot wider than that. From TFA
Four Brazilian journals were among 14 to have their impact factors suspended for a year for such stacking
Each year, Thomson Reuters detects and cracks down on excessive self-citation. This year alone, it red-flagged 23 more journals for the wearily familiar practice
The journals flagged by the new algorithm extend beyond Brazil — but only in that case has an explanation for the results emerged.
What happened in the cases of the other ten journals censured for citation stacking is unclear. One involves a close pattern of citations between three Italian journals (International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents and European Journal of Inflammation) all with the same editor-in-chief, Pio Conti, an immunologist at the University of Chieti-Pescara.
In another case, review articles with hundreds of references to Science China Life Sciences were meant not to lift its impact factor, but to clarify confusions after a rebranding and to “promote the newly reformed journal to potential new readers”
In a further case, the Journal of Instrumentation saw hundreds of cross-citations from papers authored in SPIE Proceedings by Ryszard Romaniuk, an electronic engineer who was part of the collaboration that put together the CMS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
And finally
The journals currently suspended for either self-citation or citation stacking represent only 0.6% of the 10,853 in Thomson Reuters’ respected directory.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130302/DEFREG02/303020009/Brazil-Get-Its-First-Nuclear-Subs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Space_Agency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Brazil has some great academics. Journals in many parts of the world seem to have issues going back years.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't know, but they sure got waxed!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
There was nothing physically smashed. I got all excited that someone stormed into a server room and physically destroyed things in a tittilating and completely unnecessary way. What the heck, man!?
I wonder if this story has anything to do with Brazil being on the outs with the US-UK intelligence cartel?
Google tells me a brazillion is currently about 196.7 million.
>>>Do you have any evidence to back this claim up whatsoever?
I am not about to start naming&shaming people over this. Careers got destroyed over lesser slights, and seeing how you posted AC you are all too aware of this.
>>>no reviewer or editor ever asked whether the measurements were done on a homegrown 30k or commercial 300k machine
This does not match my experiences whatsoever. If you do anything outside of defacto approved methods you will be asked to validate your methods before publishing, and nobody would be interested in publishing your validation paper on your "homegrown" machine. It is Catch 22 as far as measurements go. Unless you are inventing something new, you are not likely to get accepted anywhere with your homegrown measurement equipment, even if it is vastly cheaper and better than the alternative.
Brazil was always very helpful to the US with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Brazil did talk with the US about its nuclear, space and aerospace needs and both sides seemed happy.
As for what the US will do about Snowden, the Brazilian connection and UK press?
Use a lot more sockpuppets for tech sites like this? Try and rework UK press laws?
Work to undo any regional data protection laws with more understanding local political groups? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/brazil_data_protection/
The region is used to the term America's Backyard.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That sounds like something from Monty Python. Like the Archeology Today sketch, or even better, the Secret Service Dentists sketch.
Ezekiel 23:20
...and my first thought was: Wow! How many zeros in a brazillion?
Our population is about 200.000.000. Is this what a brazillion is? If so, eight zeros!
That's how Capitalism works. It's also the core bread-and-butter advice you get from SEO consultants.
How is it that much different than the mutual self-promotion of board members and executives in most American corporations? If you look to see who is on the board of directors of top companies, you will find executives from other top companies. Then they sit around on each other's boards and vote each other exhorbitant compensation at the expenses of consumers (no price cuts but lower quality), employees (declining wages and offshoring jobs), and even investors (how has your 401k performed over the past 10 years? CEO pay since 2009 has increased 38%). Not convinced? How about some anecdotes:
Miles D. White is the CEO of Abbot Laboratories. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of McDonald's, Caterpillar Inc., Northwestern Memorial Hospital and MediSense.
Marc Benioff is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, salesforce.com, inc. He sits on the Board of Directors of Cisco.
Greg Brown is Chairman and CEO, Motorola Solutions, Inc. He also sits on the Board of Directors of Cisco.
Marissa A. Mayer is the President and CEO of Yahoo!, Inc.. She also sits on the Board of Directors of Walmart.
Ursula M. Burns is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Xerox. She is also on the boards for American Express and Exxon Mobile.
The list goes on. In fact, you can see these details right on most company websites. It is quite uncommon to find board members who are not sitting on other boards of public companies while also serving as CEO of some other big corporation. They also serve as presidents and trustees of universities, industry groups, charities, hospitals, schools, and other non-profits, as well as even some government agencies, think tanks or advisory groups. So, pretty much all of your for-profit and non-profit leadership positions are occupied by a select group of well connected self-appointed aristocrats.
Thank you, thank, you, thank you. This is what I always have been proclaiming for the last year or so; now I have a reference to back my claims.
I would go even further though, by claiming that not only the focus on impact factors is misplaced, but the focus on number of publications as well. It is almost common practice in some fields of science to write a new paper for every insignificant incremental progress made. These papers are exceedingly boring to read because 80% of their content is filler an/or has been published before and only 20% is slightly novel. Accordingly, the number of citations they gather is low. So there are all these scientists wasting bucketloads of time pumping out papers with little merit (yes, publishing is very time-consuming), while if they would accumulate scientific progress for a somewhat longer period of time, they would be publishing more interesting papers and at the same time be able to spend more time on, you know, doing actual science. The problem is made dramatically worse by open-access journals publishing papers only based on technical soundness, not on (the reviewer's perception of) "interest to the scientific community". Don't get me wrong; I think this is a good policy and the way forward. My point is that it happens to be exacerbating a problem the underlying cause of which direly needs to be removed. Indeed, the problem could easily be fixed in the same effort as getting rid of impact factors by switching to a different personal performance metric, such as times cited over the last 12 months (or else the H-index or something like that). There's very little risk that this will overly incentivize people to slow down progress by sitting on results (as opponents often argue), because if you sit on really interesting science for too long, you'll inevitably get scooped and can kiss your citations bye-bye... What it does is disincentivize wasting time on publishing uninspired stuff nobody really cares about.