Involving Ukrainian early career scientists in publishing practices and their attitudes to scholarly communication

Abstract

This paper highlights the authorship, co-authorship, and peer review experience of Ukrainian early career scientists to see their attitudes to scholarly communication. A questionnaire was distributed through Facebook groups and university networks all over Ukraine. Results from 630 respondents demonstrated contradictory tendencies of Ukrainian early scientists’ publication activity. Most respondents try to gain recognition, adhere to high standards, and improve their writing skills. Meanwhile, there is a problem of low motivation, violations of academic integrity, detachment from the international scientific community, etc. 5.6% of respondents admitted that they wrote articles where they substituted the results without conducting experiments, deliberately distorted the results of research, and forged experimental data. Above a half of the respondents (52.9%) have experience of reviewing and consider it to improve their authorship skills, engage in scientific dialogue, cope with new methods and theories, etc. But 95.0% of reviewers had problems, for example obviously poor-quality articles for review (47.5%), a request for a review when the article does not match the reviewer’s qualifications (32.5%), no access to data to check dubious results (15.0%), lack of instructions for reviewers (10.0%), ignoring significant remarks by authors (7.5%). The survey showed a significant predominance of co-authored articles. Among the main motives for publishing co-authored articles, respondents highlighted the following: saving time, intellectual development, co-payment of publications, access to expensive equipment, the chance of being quoted, and cooperation.