bims-skolko Biomed News
on Scholarly communication
Issue of 2026–01–11
seventeen papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society
  1. Retire 'seminal' from the scientific vocabulary.
  2. Africa's research publishing landscape: examining journals, publishers, and the infrastructure behind them.
  3. Plagiarism - How to Use and Read it.
  4. Should we be worried? Retractions in complementary and alternative medicine journals.
  5. Hijacked medical journals and the risk to scholarly integrity: a web analytics study of prevalence, traffic channels, and geographic origins of traffic.
  6. Responsible Use of Large Language Models in Manuscript Preparation.
  7. Concerns About Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Literature Searches, Scholarly Writing, and Manuscript Reviews.
  8. Artificial Intelligence in Academic Research Publishing: Updates, Controversies, and Considerations for Pregnancy and Perinatal Research.
  9. Geographic disparities in prestigious neuroscience research.
  10. Regulation of AI use: further consideration and a personal proposal.
  11. Large language models in academic writing.
  12. When and how to disclose AI use in academic peer review.
  13. Turning a Rejection Into an Accepted Manuscript: How to Rework a Rejected Manuscript.
  14. Guidance for Scholarly Writing: Assuring Ethical Publishing Standards for Nursing Professionals and Doctoral Students.
  15. Understanding Chinese EFL Students' Academic Emotions Toward Teacher Written Feedback in Second Language Academic Writing.
  16. Evaluating the prevalence and application of data sharing statements in high-impact ophthalmology journals.
  17. Nothing About Us Without Us: On Publishing the Patient Voice.
  1. Nature. 2026 Jan;649(8096): 289
    Retire 'seminal' from the scientific vocabulary.
    Nicole D Sintov, Christine Sprunger.
      
    Keywords:  Journalism; Language; Publishing; Society
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04124-y
  2. Open Res Afr. 2025 ;8 20
    Africa's research publishing landscape: examining journals, publishers, and the infrastructure behind them.
    Nora Ndege, Haseeb Md Irfanullah, Jon Harle, Tom Drake.
       Background: Africa's research publishing sector is growing but remains largely fragmented and under-resourced, posing major barriers to the visibility, accessibility, and global integration of African research.
    Methods: This paper presents a continent-wide mapping of Africa's research publishing ecosystem, drawing on five integrated datasets covering 1,169 publishers and 1,790 journals to assess the scale, thematic content, linguistic diversity, and the degree of openness characterising the African publishing landscape.
    Results: The analysis reveals that the majority of journals are published by single-journal entities embedded within universities, learned societies, and research institutes. While this decentralised model allows for locally driven publishing and alignment with national research priorities, it is often constrained by limited infrastructure, inconsistent metadata practices, and lack of professional publishing support. Geographically, publishing activity is concentrated in a few countries, most notably Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa - reflecting disparities in research investment and infrastructure across the continent. Disciplinary patterns reveal a strong emphasis on the social sciences and humanities, shaped by post-independence academic development and limited commercial interest in these fields. The predominance of English in journal publishing enhances global visibility but risks marginalising non-Anglophone scholarship. The study also explores the increasing role of commercial publishers in improving visibility and editorial standards, while raising concerns about data control, sustainability, and long-term ownership of African research outputs.
    Conclusion: The paper concludes by highlighting the urgent need for coordinated, African-led investments in shared infrastructure, multilingual publishing strategies, and national indexing systems. These efforts are essential to enhance research equity, reduce dependency on external platforms, and ensure African knowledge systems are robust, inclusive, and visible in a rapidly evolving global publishing environment.
    Keywords:  African research publishing; indexing; knowledge systems; open access; publishing infrastructure; research visibility
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.12688/openresafrica.16040.1
  3. J Orthop Case Rep. 2025 Dec;15(12): 4-8
    Plagiarism - How to Use and Read it.
    Arvind Janardhan Vatkar, Sachin Kale, Ashok Shyam, Sumedha Shinde.
      Academic integrity is crucial in orthopedic surgery research, as patient care relies on the legitimacy and trustworthiness of published research. Plagiarism, or the unauthorized use of intellectual property without proper attribution, jeopardizes musculoskeletal medicine advancement and public trust. The advent of digital publishing platforms, combined with rising priority for academic production, has resulted in both purposeful and inadvertent transgressions of academic integrity norms. Modern plagiarism detection software is crucial for maintaining publication standards, but many researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of effective detection, analysis, and remediation techniques. Effective plagiarism prevention has a direct influence on patient safety, encourages innovation, and preserves the reputation of orthopedic literature in the global medical community.
    Keywords:  academic; journals; plagiarism; similarity score
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.13107/jocr.2025.v15.i12.6434
  4. Explore (NY). 2025 Dec 31. pii: S1550-8307(25)00201-0. [Epub ahead of print]22(2): 103310
    Should we be worried? Retractions in complementary and alternative medicine journals.
    Jenny M Wilkinson.
       OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to explore the nature of retraction notices associated with complementary and alternative medicine focused journals.
    METHOD: Data related to retractions in complementary and alternative medicine journals were extracted from the Retraction Watch Database for the period 2000-2025.
    RESULTS: The analysis found that there were 902 notices associated with 42 complementary and alternative medicine journals. Overall, the percentage of retractions relative to all papers published in the named journals is low (<1%) however a single journal was responsible for 84% of retractions. The majority of these retractions occurred in 2023 as the result of a wider publisher investigation into paper mills and sham peer-review. Similar to other studies, retraction was rarely due to a single cause but reflected a mix of data integrity concerns, peer-review issues, evidence of plagiarism and other issues. The average time between original publication and retraction was 19 months (mode 10 months) with 98% of publications having multiple authors. The main country of origin of authors of retracted works were China, India and South Korea.
    DISCUSSION: Published peer-reviewed literature is used in a range of ways, as the foundation for future studies, incorporated in systematic reviews, clinical decision-making and in training of practitioners and clinicians. While this study has demonstrated that retractions in the complementary and alternative medicine literature is generally at a lower level, any evidence of publication integrity breach is a concern and should be cause for ongoing monitoring.
    Keywords:  Complementary and alternative medicine; Publication retractions; Research integrity
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2025.103310
  5. Diagnosis (Berl). 2026 Jan 07.
    Hijacked medical journals and the risk to scholarly integrity: a web analytics study of prevalence, traffic channels, and geographic origins of traffic.
    Edit Ilona Pallás, Mehdi Dadkhah, Lóránt Dénes Dávid.
       OBJECTIVES: The integrity of research and science is increasingly under threat from questionable journals. In particular, hijacked journals rapidly expand, propagating scam-based, non-peer-reviewed publications. While the academic literature offers discussions, developed methodologies, and block lists to combat these fraudulent journals, the most prevalent hijacked journals and their primary distribution channels remain ambiguous.
    METHODS: To bridge this knowledge gap, the current study utilized a list of 380 previously detected hijacked journals and the web analytics platform Semrush to identify the most visited hijacked journals and their primary channels for attracting web traffic. This research first analyzes hijacked journals across various fields and then focuses specifically on hijacked medical journals.
    RESULTS: Our findings demonstrate that over 50 % of previously detected hijacked journals are active, primarily attracting researchers via email, search engines, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Furthermore, the majority of visitors to these journal websites originate from India. The results for medical journals align with these overall trends.
    CONCLUSIONS: Addressing the significant problem these questionable journals pose necessitates implementing legal action and technological solutions.
    Keywords:  AI chatbot; hijacked journal; medicine; science integrity; web analytics
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1515/dx-2025-0158
  6. Curr Protoc. 2026 Jan;6(1): e70300
    Responsible Use of Large Language Models in Manuscript Preparation.
    Antonija Mijatović, Marija Franka Žuljević, Luka Ursić, Ana Marušić.
      The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT into the public domain has transformed academic communication. While LLMs can enhance productivity and accessibility, their use in research comes with significant ethical and methodological challenges. Here, we provide suggestions on how to responsibly use LLMs when preparing scientific manuscripts based on currently available knowledge and guidelines. We first outline the potential benefits of LLMs across different stages of writing, from finding relevant literature to drafting and editing, and finally to final formatting and pre-submission checks. However, this use should be tempered with awareness of potential risks, such as "hallucinated" information, plagiarism, bias, and breaches of confidentiality and copyright. With this in mind, we clarify principles of authorship, transparency, data protection, and academic integrity in relation to LLM use, emphasizing that LLMs cannot be listed as authors and cannot replace human reasoning, interpretation, or accountability. Practical recommendations are therefore provided to help researchers verify LLM-generated content, maintain records of prompts, maintain originality, and follow institutional rules. The most important take-home point is that LLMs should primarily remain tools that support but not substitute the work of researchers in academia, as their implementation always requires human oversight. In the context of this paper, we highlight that the authors always remain accountable for the final interpretation of their findings and their representation in their manuscript. © 2026 Wiley Periodicals LLC.
    Keywords:  artificial intelligence; large language models; research ethics; scientific writing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1002/cpz1.70300
  7. Issues Ment Health Nurs. 2025 Dec;46(12): 1175-1177
    Concerns About Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Literature Searches, Scholarly Writing, and Manuscript Reviews.
    Sandra P Thomas.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840.2025.2587574
  8. Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM. 2026 Jan 01. pii: S2589-9333(25)00283-6. [Epub ahead of print] 101885
    Artificial Intelligence in Academic Research Publishing: Updates, Controversies, and Considerations for Pregnancy and Perinatal Research.
    Mariam Ayyash, Amir Aviram, Nicole Krenitsky, Timothy Wen, Vincenzo Berghella.
      Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed academic writing and publishing, progressing from simple grammar checkers and citation tools to sophisticated large language models (LLMs) capable of generating, synthesizing, and critically evaluating scientific content. A recent advancement in this space is the rise of deep research AI - agentic models that autonomously conduct structured reasoning to produce evidence-backed research outputs. While AI opens vast opportunities to enhance academic productivity, it also introduces significant ethical challenges. The challenge isn't just to use AI; rather to use it responsibly. As AI continues to reshape scholarly communication, it must be guided by clear oversight and ethical frameworks. This paper explores AI's expanding role in academic publishing, with a focus on its applications in manuscript preparation, peer review, and quality assessment. It also addresses the growing concerns surrounding authorship, research integrity, and accountability. We additionally outline key considerations unique to obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine to guide responsible and field-appropriate AI use in perinatal research and publishing. Ultimately, the responsible integration of AI, balanced with human judgment and governed by rigorous standards, will be critical to ensuring both innovation and credibility in academic research.
    Keywords:  AI; Artificial Intelligence; academia; large language models; manuscript; peer review
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajogmf.2025.101885
  9. Rev Neurosci. 2026 Jan 08.
    Geographic disparities in prestigious neuroscience research.
    Marziah Hakim, Peytn Stokes-Marshall, Kate Beecher, Joshua Wang.
      The researchers who conduct, author and review neuroscience studies inherently shape both the findings and the segments of society that ultimately benefit from the research. Generally, Western high-income nations dominate the production and dissemination of the majority of prestigious scientific research. However, the extent of geographic disparities across the neuroscience research pipeline, including at the level of editors, peer reviewers, authors, and research participants, have not been examined. This article synthesizes meta-research studies examining geographic disparities in neuroscience research, supplemented by an analysis of the properties of 2,013 articles published in the top five most prestigious neuroscience journals between 2014 and 2023. Our review demonstrates that editorial boards and authorship of neuroscience research remains concentrated in high-income Western nations, with some evidence to suggest that authors affiliated with non-high-income nations are increasingly represented. There is currently no direct evidence to suggest that authors affiliated with non-high-income countries experience disparities in peer review delays or public engagement with their research. However, our analysis shows that these authors' works receive fewer citations than their high-income nation-affiliated colleagues'. Further, while very few non-high-income nation-affiliated researchers first-author prestigious neuroscience publications, a relatively greater proportion of these prestigious publications use data from research participants in non-high-income nations. We conclude the review by summarizing current initiatives aimed at reducing geographic disparities in neuroscience research.
    Keywords:  authorship; equity; geographic disparities; neuroethics; neuroscience; publishing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1515/revneuro-2025-0091
  10. J Clin Neurosci. 2026 Jan 07. pii: S0967-5868(25)00813-6. [Epub ahead of print]145 111840
    Regulation of AI use: further consideration and a personal proposal.
    Shigeki Matsubara.
      
    Keywords:  AI detector; Artificial intelligence; ChatGPT; Manuscript; Regulation
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocn.2025.111840
  11. Mult Scler Relat Disord. 2026 Jan;pii: S2211-0348(25)00683-2. [Epub ahead of print]105 106945
    Large language models in academic writing.
    E Ann Yeh, Michael Levy, Chris Hawkes, Jeannette Lechner-Scott, Gavin Giovannoni.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.msard.2025.106945
  12. Med Teach. 2026 Jan 10. 1-3
    When and how to disclose AI use in academic peer review.
    Ken Masters, Jennifer Cleland.
      Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to review academic papers is happening and cannot be ignored by journals. There is a need to find a balance between outright banning and uncontrolled usage. Medical Teacher recognises this need, and this commentary views the problem within the general context of authorship, discusses some of the problems surrounding AI-reviewing, and offers a middle ground of practice and disclosure that will assist authors, reviewers, and the journal in ensuring that the review process is not compromised.
    Keywords:  Artificial Intelligence; publishing; reviewing
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2025.2609741
  13. Am Surg. 2026 Jan 09. 31348261416454
    Turning a Rejection Into an Accepted Manuscript: How to Rework a Rejected Manuscript.
    Don K Nakayama.
      Rejection is a routine and expected part of surgical publishing. Many manuscripts that ultimately reach publication have been declined by at least one journal, most often not because of flawed data or poor execution, but because of misalignment between the work and a journal's scope, audience, or expectations. For many authors, particularly trainees and early-career surgeons, a rejected submission is experienced as an endpoint rather than an opportunity for reassessment. For papers that eventually succeed, the outcome depends less on persistence than on how thoughtfully the manuscript is revised and repositioned. This editorial presents a practical, editor-informed approach to reworking a rejected manuscript for resubmission. Key steps include reading reviews with distance, diagnosing the structural reasons for rejection, and selecting the next journal deliberately based on mission and readership. Successful resubmission usually requires reframing rather than polishing. Authors are encouraged to revise the abstract and discussion to emphasize clinical decision making, strengthen context through comparison with existing literature, and revise the manuscript itself rather than relying on a persuasive cover letter. Attention is also given to reassessing currency, redundancy, and scholarly contribution. When similar titles already exist or recent systematic reviews address the same topic, authors should reconsider scope and identify what the work truly adds or pursue a different scholarly product altogether. When approached with judgment and clarity, rejection often serves as redirection toward a more effective and ultimately successful contribution to surgical practice.
    Keywords:  Journal fit; Manuscript rejection; Peer review; Scholarly reframing; Surgical publsihng
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1177/00031348261416454
  14. J Pediatr Health Care. 2026 Jan 08. pii: S0891-5245(25)00413-4. [Epub ahead of print]
    Guidance for Scholarly Writing: Assuring Ethical Publishing Standards for Nursing Professionals and Doctoral Students.
    Donna Hallas, Regena Spratling.
      Nursing professionals and doctoral nursing students engage in scholarly work throughout the academic experience and their careers. However, they often find the writing and publishing processes challenging. Studies have shown that 41.3% of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) graduates who completed the traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) dissertation never published the findings. To date, studies that have examined or validated the total number of Doctor of Nursing Practice graduates who have published their scholarly quality improvement or evidence-based practice improvement projects are limited. This article presents successful ways to organize and prepare a manuscript for submission to a nursing scientific journal. A discussion on editor decisions and ways to respond to reviewer comments and editor decisions is presented. Also discussed are unethical behaviors in scholarly writing including the problems and outcomes for authors who submit plagiarized work, duplicate submissions, using generative artificial intelligence to create a manuscript, and retractions of published work.
    Keywords:  Publication; duplicate publications; plagiarism; retraction of publication
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedhc.2025.12.011
  15. J Psycholinguist Res. 2026 Jan 09. 55(1): 6
    Understanding Chinese EFL Students' Academic Emotions Toward Teacher Written Feedback in Second Language Academic Writing.
    Yonglin Chen, Shulin Yu, Chenggang Liang, Nan Zhou.
      
    Keywords:  Academic emotions; Academic writing; EFL university students; L2 writing; Teacher written feedback (TWF)
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-025-10191-z
  16. Eye (Lond). 2026 Jan 06.
    Evaluating the prevalence and application of data sharing statements in high-impact ophthalmology journals.
    Mahad Chaudhry, Chance Bratten, Eli Paul, Eli Oldham, Ahmed Elghzali, Annes Elfar, Matt Vassar.
       BACKGROUND: There is a growing burden that highlights the need for ophthalmology research to improve treatment outcomes and patient care. By promoting transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration, Data Sharing Statements (DSS) provide a formal declaration of whether and how data can be accessed, reused, or shared, ensuring that research findings can be validated. This study examines the prevalence, content, and implementation of DSS in ophthalmology journals from 2018 to 2023.
    METHODS: A comprehensive literature search in MEDLINE (PubMed) was conducted to evaluate clinical studies published in ten leading ophthalmology journals between January 1, 2018, and December 14, 2023. Data extraction was conducted via a standardized form in a masked, duplicate fashion. A hierarchical logistic regression was used to assess factors with potential influence on DSS inclusion. A qualitative analysis was performed to identify common themes in DSS.
    RESULTS: Of the 1385 articles analyzed, 326 (23.54%) included a DSS, with notable variability in DSS inclusion between journals. The British Journal of Ophthalmology had the highest DSS rate (152/228, 66.67%), while Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science had the lowest (4/103, 3.88%). Clinical trials were the most observed study design; however, DSS rates were low (183/667; 27%). Factors including study design, impact factor, funding type, and article access did not significantly influence DSS inclusion. The most common DSS themes were Conditional Data Availability (199/302, 65.89%) and Gatekeeper Role (87/302, 28.81%).
    CONCLUSION: Implementing stronger mandates and adopting standardized data-sharing policies could address barriers to data-sharing practices, improving transparency and reproducibility in ophthalmology research.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41433-025-04214-1
  17. Med Care. 2026 Feb 01. 64(2S Suppl 3): S172-S173
    Nothing About Us Without Us: On Publishing the Patient Voice.
    Jennifer Tjia.
      
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0000000000002266
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2026‒01‒11 at 12:34.