Preserving the Integrity of Citations and References by All Stakeholders of Science Communication

Abstract

Citations to scholarly items are building bricks for multidisciplinary science communication. Citation analyses are currently influencing individual career advancement and ranking of academic and research institutions worldwide. This article overviews the involvement of scientific authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, indexers, and learned associations in the citing and referencing to preserve the integrity of science communication. Authors are responsible for thorough bibliographic searches to select relevant references for their articles, comprehend main points, and cite them in an ethical way. Reviewers and editors may perform additional searches and recommend missing essential references. Publishers, in turn, are in a position to instruct their authors over the citations and references, provide tools for validation of references, and open access to bibliographies. Publicly available reference lists bear important information about the novelty and relatedness of the scholarly items with the published literature. Few editorial associations have dealt with the issue of citations and properly managed references. As a prime example, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued in December 2014 an updated set of recommendations on the need for citing primary literature and avoiding unethical references, which are applicable to the global scientific community. With the exponential growth of literature and related references, it is critically important to define functions of all stakeholders of science communication in curbing the issue of irrational and unethical citations and thereby improve the quality and indexability of scholarly journals.

The Pressure to Publish More and the Scope of Predatory Publishing Activities

“…In fact, evidence suggests that the vast majority of abstracts (65%–79%) presented at congresses of professional societies never transform into full articles and do not influence the scientific discourse (345). Although bibliographic databases of Elsevier and Thomson Reuters are expanding coverage of conference proceedings and abstracts fulfilling certain quality criteria, such items are not counted as complete reports and are not recommended for citing (6). Given numerous deficiencies in reporting, even systematic reviews presented in the form of abstracts cannot be considered as reliable evidence-based accounts (7).…”

Open Access Journals: Good or Bad Reading?

“…To publish relevant animal and clinical knowledge available on the WEB under the open access model, the OAJ have to maintain the highest scientific standards, therefore OAJ can be competitive with similar journals and also compete with non-OAJ [8,20,21]. OAJ listed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific influence and quality as paid subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges [22].…”

Accuracy of References in Journal Literature of Medical Sciences: A Review

“…It is critically important to clearly define the role and tasks of all key stakeholders of scientific communication for monitoring and controlling the problems of irrational and unethical references. With the phenomenal growth and uncontrolled development of literary items and related references, it is a challengeable function of scientific community to increase the quality and indexability of scholarly writings, especially in journal"s articles 10 (Gasparyan et al, 2015).…”