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Defining the Scholarly Record

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Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity

Part of the book series: Research Ethics Forum ((REFF,volume 6))

Abstract

This chapter provides a conceptualization of the scholarly record. I propose that items that belong indisputably to the scholarly record meet six hallmarks: the Knowledge, Authorship, Publication, Library, Database, and Discipline conditions. Books issued by scholarly presses and articles appearing in established journals have been the traditional formats for presenting research findings, and such items clearly meet these six conditions. Advances in technology, however, have occasioned new modes for recording and disseminating knowledge, and they create challenges to the long-standing conceptualizations of the scholarly record. Online post-publication review venues, open-access initiatives, interactive scholarly websites, online document repositories, and other venues invite a reconsideration of the precise boundary of the published literature. I distinguish between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the scholarly record. Separating these two allows one to isolate the scholarly record as a present system from past versions that have operated under different parameters and also from future versions that are only anticipated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Articles that do not present new research, such as published editorials, do however occasionally appear in academic journals anonymously (see, for example, Neuroskeptic 2012). Furthermore, corrections issued by editors and publishers—such as retractions, errata, corrigenda, and expressions of concern—are typically published within the pages of journals without an explicit author of record . Some journals that cover controversial research areas occasionally allow authors to use disclosed pseudonyms . The editors of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior have recently allowed two articles on pedophilia to be published under the pseudonym “Max Geradt.” The articles display the note: “Geradt is sexually interested in children and is co-authoring this article under a pseudonym” (Geradt et al. 2018: 375; Jahnke et al. 2015: 2173).

  2. 2.

    This author name was supplemented in print with the qualification “as told to Michael F. Patton, Jr.” Some electronic copies circulating online lack this qualification.

  3. 3.

    Both the 1965 and 1971 articles have been republished in anthologies with “Diodorus Cronus” as the author of record . The republication of the 1971 article four years later states that Richard Taylor wrote the work “under a pseudonym” (Diodorus Cronus 1975: 96). The republication of the 1965 article appeared with a new title “The Necessity of Everything That One Does,” with “Diodorus Cronus” as the author of record, but with an introductory statement hinting at the true authorship by referencing Taylor’s apiculture interests: “Diodorus Cronus is a metaphysician and beekeeper who lives in Trumansburg, N. Y.” (Diodorus Cronus 1978: 148). It was republished twice more, but without reference to the original author of record “Diodorus Cronus” (Cahn 2007: 19–24; Cahn et al. 2011: 137–144) .

  4. 4.

    A 2017 editorial in The Lancet, titled, “PubMed should Raise the Bar for Journal Inclusion,” reported a study showing that predatory journals have infiltrated databases in some medical sub-disciplines, including neuroscience, neurology, and rehabilitation (Manca et al. 2017a: 734, see b). For a qualified defense of some of the benefits that predatory publishers provide to the research community, see Eve and Priego 2017.

  5. 5.

    The delay between prior online accessibility and print publication may be intentional by some editors who seek to implement an ‘online queue’ stratagem for boosting impact factors . The delay creates a longer window for increasing citations within an impact factor calculation timeframe (Martin 2016a: 40–41, b: 4–5) .

  6. 6.

    The ongoing changes in formatting from the print version of a work has been subject to critique. For one approach, see “The Evils of Oxford Scholarship Online ” (Pasnau 2014).

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Dougherty, M.V. (2018). Defining the Scholarly Record. In: Correcting the Scholarly Record for Research Integrity. Research Ethics Forum, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99435-2_2

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