Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing

Citation is an essential practice in scientific publishing. However, it is mandatory that citing the sources in a scientific work is performed in a proper manner. Manipulating citations in research articles is one form of academic research misconduct that violates publication ethics. Citation manipulation simply occurs for the purpose of increasing the number of citations of a researcher or a journal. Unfortunately, there has been a growing trend for this type of misconduct recently and this has not received much attention from the science community. The most effective solution to prevent the growth of such unethical practices is for reputable journals to impose stricter rules on reference evaluation criteria in order to emphasize on the appropriateness of the citations.

Deciphering dimensions of overlapping publications

Proving research efficiency and academic growth by the number of publications flag the researchers to publish more articles from a single dataset. They are crossing into unethical practices such as self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, and other research misconducts, which warrant disciplinary action against them. The thrust of this review is to draw the attention of the authors, reviewers, editors, and readers toward different dimensions of overlapping publications in research. Various guidelines and ethical bodies such as Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors were considered for the review. The present review provides an expansive outline of publication overlap available in the literature. The reasons for conducting and problems associated with different types of overlapping publications are identified. Preventive and remedial measures as well as recommendations for authors, editors, and reviewers have been highlighted. Because of the strain to “publish or perish” from the researchers’ end, journals are ending up being flooded with overlapping publications.

Retraction notice regarding several articles published in Tumor Biology

The publisher and the Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with former publisher of Tumor Biology, retract a total of 15 articles from the journals’ online catalog. The articles were published in different issues of the journal during the period 2014–2016. All articles affected by this retraction notice have problems related to image manipulation or misuse. A detailed explanation is given for each retracted article. The investigations were carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Diretrizes para Autores

A Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos (RBEP) publica apenas textos inéditos. É um periódico de acesso aberto sob licença Creative Commons, portanto, permite compartilhar, distribuir, exibir e fazer trabalhos derivados de seu conteúdo, desde que se atribuam os créditos devidos.A exatidão das informações e os conceitos e opiniões emitidos nos textos submetidos são de exclusiva responsabilidade dos autores (as), não refletindo, necessariamente, a opinião da equipe editorial da Revista.A RBEP prima pelas boas práticas científicas com base nas diretrizes do Comittee on Publication Ethics (Cope) e empenha-se em coibir más condutas, como plágio ou possíveis violações éticas.

Preparing Your Manuscript: Strong and Ethical Scholarly Writing for Multidisciplinary Audiences

This presentation will emphasize the importance of plain, good writing. Editors read 10 or more manuscripts per week with pressure to reject 80-90% of them. If the point and contribution are not clear in a quick scan of the paper, it will not be reviewed favorably. I will provide tips for writing that are commonly violated in submissions, provide references for additional writing support, cover expectations for language consistent with GSA’s Reframing Aging initiative, and discuss some common publication ethics issues that arise during the review process, including author contributions and embedding your scholarship in the context of prior work.

How to Publish: Guidance From GSA’s Journal Editors

Each year he GSA publications team sponsors a symposium to assist authors who wish to publish in GSA’s high impact and influential journals. The first part of the session will include five brief presentations from the editors of The Gerontologist, Innovation and Aging, and the Journals of Gerontology Series A and B plus GSA’s managing editors. We will integrate practical tips with principles of publication ethics and scholarly integrity. The topics will be as follows: (1) Preparing your manuscript: strong and ethical scholarly writing for multidisciplinary audiences, (2) common problems that affect peer review, (3) addressing translational significance and fit to journal expectations, (4) transparency, documentation, and Open Science; and (5) working with Scholar One. Following these presentations, we will hold round table discussions with editors from the GSA journals portfolio. At these round tables, editors will answer questions related to the podium presentations and other questions specific to each journal. Intended audiences include emerging and international scholars, and authors interested in learning more about best practices and tips for getting their scholarly work published.

Retracted “Serum amyloid P down-regulates CCL-1 expression, and inhibits Ras/MAPK signaling and development of breast cancer”

This article previously published in Volume 17 Issue 16 of this journal in September 2017 has been retracted in line with the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE,http://publicationethics.org/ resources/guidelines). Retraction: Ding S, Li H, Li X, Wang W, Du X, Dong G, Zhang P. Serum amyloid P down-regulates CCL-1 expression, and inhibits Ras/MAPK signaling and development of breast cancer. Trop J Pharm Res 2017; 16(9):2089-2095 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v16i9.7 To the editor: The figures in the paper were plagiarized partly from an earlier published article, Qi et al, P-selectinmediated tablet adhesion promoters tumor growth. Oncotarget 2015;30:6(9):6584–6596, and data from a master's thesis submitted by Bin Li under the supervision of Professor Lijing Wang and Professor Cuiling Qi. Sincerely, Cuiling Qi and Lijing Wang.

EFFECT OF INTERVENTION ON KNOWLEDGE AND ATTITUDE TOWARDS PLAGIARISM AMONG POST- GRADUATE STUDENTS IN BANGLADESH - A PILOT STUDY

An attempt to tackle plagiarism locally, an exercise was developed and evaluated by pre-test and post-test questionnaire on 50 post-Graduate medical students at Department of Public Health & Informatics, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, Bangladesh in 2017 to understand learner’s understanding regarding plagiarism. The comparative data between pre and post-test have highlighted a general lack of understanding of the basic concept of plagiarism and how to avoid plagiarism which improved after the intervention. For the question how to prevent plagiarism, before intervention, only 36% answered that a paraphrased sentence should be referenced. However, after intervention, responses to the same question significantly increased to 72%. Likewise, pre-intervention for a question of whether an article can be submitted to another journal if the decision is delayed, almost half of the students (48%) were not sure what should to do. But after intervention, all respondents (100%) understood that an article cannot be submitted to another journal if decision delayed. For a question of making two or three articles from same thesis/research with same introduction and method, all most half of the respondent (46%) answered “yes” and approximately half do not know the answer (40%) before intervention. However, after the intervention all respondents (100%) felt they should not make two or three articles with same introduction or methods. Also, after intervention all respondents (100%) felt self-plagiarism is taking paragraph/picture from own article without reference. These results indicate that the intervention of plagiarism education improved the knowledge of this group of post-graduate medical students. Keywords: Copy-cut-paste; Plagiarism; Publication ethics