Journal PLoS Research Articles

Retracted] lncRNA TTN‑AS1 upregulates RUNX1 to enhance glioma progression via sponging miR‑27b‑3p.

Following the publication of the above paper, it was drawn to the Editor's attention by a concerned reader that the immunohistochemical images shown in Fig. 7E were strikingly similar to data that had already been published in different form in a previous article in the journal PLoS One written by different authors at different research institutes. Owing to the fact that the abovementioned data had already apparently been published previously, the Editor of Oncology Reports has decided that this paper should be retracted from the Journal. The authors were asked for an explanation to account for these concerns, but the Editorial Office did not receive a reply. The Editor apologizes to the readership for any inconvenience caused. [Oncology Reports 44: 1064‑1074, 2020; DOI: 10.3892/or.2020.7684].

Publication trends and research hotspots of IL-1: A bibliometric analysis of IL-1 with relevance to anesthesia in highly cited papers from WoSCC

BackgroundThe IL-1 family has been discovered for more than 40 years, and its roles have been extensively explored in numerous studies, involving innate immunity, acquired immunity, and many inflammatory-associated diseases. In this study, we aimed to identify the research hotspots and forecast future trends through bibliometric analysis. MethodsThe articles and reviews were downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database from the inception of the database to October 28th, 2022. CiteSpace and Online Analysis Platform of Literature Metrology were used for bibliometric and knowledge-map analyses. ResultsA total of 128,915 papers were included in 5703 academic journals by more than 100,000 authors in 35,411 institutions from 173 countries/regions. USA and China were the most productive countries. University of California System contributed the highest number of papers followed by Harvard University and Udice French Research Universities. The journal PLoS One published the most papers on IL-1. Eicke Latz contributed the most publications. Notably, the number of highly cited papers was 826, included in 358 academic journals by 7443 authors in 1803 institutions from 77 countries/regions. USA was absolutely in the leading position in highly cited papers, with Harvard Medical School producing the most highly cited publications. Nature was the maximum co-cited journal, meanwhile, and published the largest number of highly cited papers. Charles A. Dinarello authored the most papers and had the highest number of co-citations. The most of top 10 co-cited references in highly cited papers on mechanisms and diseases reflected the emphasis on the knowledge basis. The most influential research hotspots included mechanisms, the roles in different diseases, and pharmacological inhibitors. In addition, the cytokine storm emerged as the latest hotspot, driven by the breakout of COVID-19. ConclusionsAs a participant in the inflammatory reaction, the IL-1 family plays important roles in a variety of physiological and pathological processes by bibliometric analysis. This analysis of IL-1 will help the researchers identify the current hotspots of this field and forecast potential future research directions.

Beyond authorship: Analyzing contributions in PLOS ONE and the challenges of appropriate attribution

Abstract Purpose This study aims to evaluate the accuracy of authorship attributions in scientific publications, focusing on the fairness and precision of individual contributions within academic works. Design/methodology/approach The study analyzes 81,823 publications from the journal PLOS ONE, covering the period from January 2018 to June 2023. It examines the authorship attributions within these publications to try and determine the prevalence of inappropriate authorship. It also investigates the demographic and professional profiles of affected authors, exploring trends and potential factors contributing to inaccuracies in authorship. Findings Surprisingly, 9.14% of articles feature at least one author with inappropriate authorship, affecting over 14,000 individuals (2.56% of the sample). Inappropriate authorship is more concentrated in Asia, Africa, and specific European countries like Italy. Established researchers with significant publication records and those affiliated with companies or nonprofits show higher instances of potential monetary authorship. Research limitations Our findings are based on contributions as declared by the authors, which implies a degree of trust in their transparency. However, this reliance on self-reporting may introduce biases or inaccuracies into the dataset. Further research could employ additional verification methods to enhance the reliability of the findings. Practical implications These findings have significant implications for journal publishers, highlighting the necessity for robust control mechanisms to ensure the integrity of authorship attributions. Moreover, researchers must exercise discernment in determining when to acknowledge a contributor and when to include them in the author list. Addressing these issues is crucial for maintaining the credibility and fairness of academic publications. Originality/value This study contributes to an understanding of critical issues within academic authorship, shedding light on the prevalence and impact of inappropriate authorship attributions. By calling for a nuanced approach to ensure accurate credit is given where it is due, the study underscores the importance of upholding ethical standards in scholarly publishing.

Do more heads imply better performance? An empirical study of team thought leaders' impact on scientific team performance

Thought leadership plays a crucial role in boosting team performance; thus, teams with more thought leaders may perform better. However, the impact of the number of thought leaders on team performance in a scientific context remains understudied. In this study, we consider the authors of a publication as a scientific team and define the authors responsible for conceptual tasks, i.e., “conceived and designed the experiments” (one of the tasks described in the PLOS contribution statements classification system), as thought leaders. Leveraging more than 140,000 papers from PLOS journals, we examine the relationship between the number of thought leaders and two aspects of team performance (i.e., team impact and team disruptiveness) from both correlational and causal perspectives. The results showed that (1) an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between the number of thought leaders and the team's impact, and (2) teams with more thought leaders tend to produce less disruptive ideas. We also explored the impact of international collaboration, team size, and gender diversity together with the number of thought leaders on team performance and found that (3) international collaboration improves team impact but lowers the disruptiveness of team outputs. This study advances scholarly understanding of thought leadership in scientific teams and provides valuable insights for policymakers and team managers.

How do life sciences cite social sciences? Characterizing the volume and trajectory of citations

AbstractSocial sciences are increasingly recognized as significant for building a sustainable world since the social perspective can assist researchers in other fields in navigating public controversy and designing more responsible interaction mechanisms between the natural and social systems. However, the question arises: to what extent do natural sciences rely on social science research in their studies? Examining life science publications from seven PLoS journals, this paper attempts to characterize the volume and trajectory of citations from life sciences to social sciences. We explore three core questions: To what extent do life sciences cite social sciences? What actors in the life sciences are citing social sciences? Which actors in the social sciences are being cited? Our analysis estimates social sciences influence 15%–19% of life science publications, contributing to 1.1%–1.5% of references in 2018. Social science citers are found across peripheral and central topics of life science disciplines. Cited social science publications exhibit various levels of interdisciplinarity and achieve the greatest citation impact among peers. Citations to social sciences are prevalent in both theoretically and methodologically oriented sections. We show empirically the increasing impact of social sciences on the development of the life sciences.

What does open peer review bring to scientific articles? Evidence from PLoS journals

What does open peer review bring to scientific articles? Evidence from PLoS journals

A study of the correlation between publication delays and measurement indicators of journal articles in the social network environment-based on online data in PLOS.

The development of network technique and open access has made numerous research results freely obtained online, thereby facilitating the growth of the emerging evaluation methods of Altmetrics. However, it is unknown whether the time interval from reception to publication has an impact on the evaluation indicators of articles in the social network environment. We construct a range of time-series indexes that represent the features of the evaluation indicators and then explore the correlation of acceptance delay, technical delay, and overall delay with the relevant indicators of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections that are obtained from the open access journal platform PLOS. Moreover, this research also explores the differences in the correlations of the delays for the literature in six subject areas with the corresponding indicators and the discrepancies of the correlations of delays and indexes in various metric quartiles. The results of the Mann-Whitney U test reveal that the length of delays affects the performance of the literature on some indicators. This study indicates that reducing the acceptance time and final publication time of articles can improve the efficiency of knowledge diffusion through the formal academic citation channel, but in the context of social networking communication, an appropriate interval at a particular stage in the publishing process can enhance the heat of sharing, discussion, and collection of articles to a small extent, hence boosting the influence and attention received by the literature on the internet.

Female Dynamics in Authorship of Scientific Publications in the Public Library of Science: A 10-year Bibliometric Analysis of Biomedical Research.

Women are generally underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). As scientific production reflects scholarly impact and participation in the scientific process, the number of journal publications forms a pertinent measure of academic productivity. This study examined the prevalence and evolution of female representation in prominent author positions across multidisciplinary biomedical research. Publications from seven exemplar cross-specialty journals of the Public Library of Science (PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology, PLoS One, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases) between January 2010 and December 2020 were extracted from Web of Science. Using Genderize.io, the gender of authors from their first names was estimated using a 75% threshold. The association between female prevalence in first and last authorship and journal was evaluated using a binary logistic regression, and odds ratios were estimated against a 50:50 reference on gender. In 266,739 publications, 43.3% of first authors and 26.7% of last authors were females. Across the ten-year period, female first authorship increased by 19.6% and last authorship by 3.2%. Among all journals, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases had the greatest total proportion of female first authors (45.7%) and PLoS Medicine of female last authors (32%), while PLoS Computational Biology had the lowest proportion in these categories (23.7% and 17.2%). First authors were less likely to be females in all PLoS journals (p < 0.05) except for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (odds ratio: 0.84, 95% confidence interval: 0.71-1.00), where the odds of female authorship were not significantly different (p = 0.054). Last authors were not more likely to be females in all PLoS journals (p < 0.001). Overall, women still appear underrepresented as first authors in biomedical publications and their representation as last authors has severely lagged. Efforts towards gender equality in scholarly authorship will contribute to the representation of women in biomedical research and ensure that their potential is not lost.

Analysis of the characteristics of retracted scientific papers in the field of global liver diseases published by Chinese scholars

Objective: To analyze the characteristics of scientific papers in the field of global liver diseases published by Chinese scholars that were retracted for diverse reasons from the Retraction Watch database, so as to provide a reference to publishing-related papers. Methods: The Retraction Watch database was retrieved for retracted papers in the field of global liver disease published by Chinese scholars from March 1, 2008 to January 28, 2021. The regional distribution, source journals, reasons for retraction, publication and retraction times, and others were analyzed. Results: A total of 101 retracted papers that were distributed across 21 provinces/cities were retrieved. Zhejiang area (n = 17) had the most retracted papers, followed by Shanghai (n = 14), and Beijing (n = 11). The vast majority were research papers (n = 95). The journal PLoS One had the highest number of retracted papers. In terms of time distribution, 2019 (n = 36) had the most retracted papers. 23 papers, accounting for 8.3% of all retractions, were retracted owing to journal or publisher concerns. Liver cancer (34%), liver transplantation (16%), hepatitis (14%), and others were the main areas of retracted papers. Conclusion: Chinese scholars have a large number of retracted articles in the field of global liver diseases. A journal or publisher chooses to retract a manuscript after investigating and discovering more flawed problems, which, however, require further support, revision, and supervision from the editorial and academic circles.

Author-suggested reviewers rate manuscripts much more favorably: A cross-sectional analysis of the neuroscience section of PLOS ONE.

Peer review is an important part of science, aimed at providing expert and objective assessment of a manuscript. Because of many factors, including time constraints, unique expertise needs, and deference, many journals ask authors to suggest peer reviewers for their own manuscript. Previous researchers have found differing effects about this practice that might be inconclusive due to sample sizes. In this article, we analyze the association between author-suggested reviewers and review invitation, review scores, acceptance rates, and subjective review quality using a large dataset of close to 8K manuscripts from 46K authors and 21K reviewers from the journal PLOS ONE's Neuroscience section. We found that all-author-suggested review panels increase the chances of acceptance by 20 percent points vs all-editor-suggested panels while agreeing to review less often. While PLOS ONE has since ended the practice of asking for suggested reviewers, many others still use them and perhaps should consider the results presented here.

Study says antidepressants not as effective in the long term

Although it is generally well known that depression has a significant impact on patients' health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) over the long term, using antidepressants is not associated with significantly better HRQoL compared with people with depression who do not take the drugs, say researchers of a new study published April 20 in the open‐access journal PLOS ONE.

AT-NeuroEAE: A Joint Extraction Model of Events With Attributes for Research Sharing-Oriented Neuroimaging Provenance Construction.

Provenances are a research focus of neuroimaging resources sharing. An amount of work has been done to construct high-quality neuroimaging provenances in a standardized and convenient way. However, besides existing processed-based provenance extraction methods, open research sharing in computational neuroscience still needs one way to extract provenance information from rapidly growing published resources. This paper proposes a literature mining-based approach for research sharing-oriented neuroimaging provenance construction. A group of neuroimaging event-containing attributes are defined to model the whole process of neuroimaging researches, and a joint extraction model based on deep adversarial learning, called AT-NeuroEAE, is proposed to realize the event extraction in a few-shot learning scenario. Finally, a group of experiments were performed on the real data set from the journal PLOS ONE. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a practical approach to quickly collect research information for neuroimaging provenance construction oriented to open research sharing.

Neuroimaging-ITM: A Text Mining Pipeline Combining Deep Adversarial Learning with Interaction Based Topic Modeling for Enabling the FAIR Neuroimaging Study.

Sharing various neuroimaging digital resources have received widespread attention in FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) neuroscience. In order to support a comprehensive understanding of brain cognition, neuroimaging provenance should be constructed to characterize both research processes and results, and integrates various digital resources for quick replication and open cooperation. This brings new challenges to neuroimaging text mining, including fragmented information, lack of labelled corpora, and vague topics. This paper proposes a text mining pipeline for enabling the FAIR neuroimaging study. In order to avoid fragmented information, the Brain Informatics provenance model is redesigned based on NIDM (Neuroimaging Data Model) and FAIR facets. It can systematically capture the provenance requests from the FAIR neuroimaging study and then transform them into a group of text mining tasks. A neuroimaging text mining pipeline combining deep adversarial learning with interaction based topic modeling, called neuroimaging interaction topic model (Neuroimaging-ITM), is proposed to automatically extract neuroimaging provenance and identify research topics in the few-shot scenario. Finally, a group of experiments is completed by using real data from the journal PloS One. The experimental results show that Neuroimaging-ITM can systematically and accurately extract provenance information and obtain high-quality research topics from the full text of neuroimaging articles. Most of the mean F1 values of provenance extraction exceed 0.9. The topic coherence and KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence reach 9.95 and 0.96 respectively. The results are obviously better than baseline methods.

Measuring the citation context of national self‐references

AbstractThe emphasis on research evaluation has brought scrutiny to the role of self‐citations in the scholarly communication process. While author self‐citations have been studied at length, little is known on national‐level self‐references (SRs). This paper analyses the citation context of national SRs, using the full‐text of 184,859 papers published in PLOS journals. It investigates the differences between national SRs and nonself‐references (NSRs) in terms of their in‐text mention, presence in enumerations, and location features. For all countries, national SRs exhibit a higher level of engagement than NSRs. NSRs are more often found in enumerative citances than SRs, which suggests that researchers pay more attention to domestic than foreign studies. There are more mentions of national research in the methods section, which provides evidence that methodologies developed in a nation are more likely to be used by other researchers from the same nation. Publications from the United States are cited at a higher rate in each of the sections, indicating that the country still maintains a dominant position in science. On the whole, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of national SRs in the scholarly communication system, and how it varies across countries and over time.

Who Reads PLOS Research Articles? Extensive Analysis of the Mendeley Readership Categories of PLOS Journals

Who Reads PLOS Research Articles? Extensive Analysis of the Mendeley Readership Categories of PLOS Journals

Bibliometric Analysis and Methodological Review of Mobile Health Services and Applications in India

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to analyze the literature published on mobile health (mHealth) in the Indian context. It also reviews the most important research works and presents various methodologies adopted by the researchers in this domain. Design/methodology/approachThe SciVerse SCOPUS database was used for extracting the literature on mobile health. The study used articles published between January 2008 to 28th June 2019. The keyword used is ‘mHealth’ and journal articles with studies or interventions carried out in India were selected for bibliometric analysis and methodological review. FindingsFor the keyword search, a total of 7,874 documents have been extracted, of which only 158 have been considered for the analysis. There is an exponential increase in the number of publications from the year 2015 to 2019. The keywords used for representing their articles have been grouped as mobile health devices, gender and age groups, system and software, health and disease condition, management, evidence-based practices (outcome), methods, and importance of the study. The journal PLOS One (87) has the highest number of citations, followed by The Lancet (63). The bibliometric analysis of the literature revealed seven clusters classified as individual’s individual’s mobile health applications adoption characteristics, need for mobile health and its governance, mobile phone application with the internet of things based framework for healthcare monitoring, mobile health for primary healthcare systems, authentication and security protocol for mobile healthcare, development and experimentation of mobile health application, and development and mobile health for adherence support intervention. Originality/ValueThe study contributes in analyzing the bibliometrics and provides a methodological review for the journal articles published on mobile health. Previous articles considered systematic analysis of the bibliometric for mHealth, and mobile technology but less adequately discussed specifically towards Indian context which this study has embraced.

Task specialization across research careers.

Research careers are typically envisioned as a single path in which a scientist starts as a member of a team working under the guidance of one or more experienced scientists and, if they are successful, ends with the individual leading their own research group and training future generations of scientists. Here we study the author contribution statements of published research papers in order to explore possible biases and disparities in career trajectories in science. We used Bayesian networks to train a prediction model based on a dataset of 70,694 publications from PLoS journals, which included 347,136 distinct authors and their associated contribution statements. This model was used to predict the contributions of 222,925 authors in 6,236,239 publications, and to apply a robust archetypal analysis to profile scientists across four career stages: junior, early-career, mid-career and late-career. All three of the archetypes we found - leader, specialized, and supporting - were encountered for early-career and mid-career researchers. Junior researchers displayed only two archetypes (specialized, and supporting), as did late-career researchers (leader and supporting). Scientists assigned to the leader and specialized archetypes tended to have longer careers than those assigned to the supporting archetype. We also observed consistent gender bias at all stages: the majority of male scientists belonged to the leader archetype, while the larger proportion of women belonged to the specialized archetype, especially for early-career and mid-career researchers.

How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers

Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the platform—including users’ personal timelines—and use it to gather data for all articles published between 2015 to 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE. We compare the gathered data with altmetrics collected and aggregated by Altmetric. The results show that 58.7% of papers shared on Facebook happen outside of public spaces and that, when collecting all shares, the volume of activity approximates patterns of engagement previously only observed for Twitter. Both results suggest that the role and impact of Facebook as a medium for science and scholarly communication has been underestimated. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of openness and transparency around the collection and aggregation of altmetrics.

Social dimension activates the usage and academic impact of Open Access publications in Andean countries: a structural modeling-based approach

Most of the altmetric research in developing countries is descriptive and has not tested models exploring relationships among article-level factors. Therefore, there is a knowledge gap on this issue. The research question for this study was the following: Social dimension is the factor that activates the usage and citation of Open Access publications in Andean countries. DOIs of Andean countries publications in PLoS journals were downloaded using (n = 3,186) using rplos, an Application Programming Interface (API) developed for R: Bolivia (n = 121), Chile (n = 1,180), Colombia (n = 826), Ecuador (n = 266), Peru (n = 622), and Venezuela (n = 171). Data modeling was carried out with Partial Least Squares – Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The hypothesized structural model accounted for at least 41% of the explained variance of citations (R2 = 0.406). Among the two associated factors, the usage made the highest contribution (at least 0.639), while the social media showed a negative contribution. The application of PLS-SEM for modeling the information-seeking behavior, at the document level, highlights the positive evidence for the path social → usage → citation, but a negative and nonsignificant association between the social dimension and citation.

Co‐contributorship network and division of labor in individual scientific collaborations

AbstractCollaborations are pervasive in current science. Collaborations have been studied and encouraged in many disciplines. However, little is known about how a team really functions from the detailed division of labor within. In this research, we investigate the patterns of scientific collaboration and division of labor within individual scholarly articles by analyzing their co‐contributorship networks. Co‐contributorship networks are constructed by performing the one‐mode projection of the author–task bipartite networks obtained from 138,787 articles published in PLoS journals. Given an article, we define 3 types of contributors: Specialists, Team‐players, and Versatiles. Specialists are those who contribute to all their tasks alone; team‐players are those who contribute to every task with other collaborators; and versatiles are those who do both. We find that team‐players are the majority and they tend to contribute to the 5 most common tasks as expected, such as “data analysis” and “performing experiments.” The specialists and versatiles are more prevalent than expected by our designed 2 null models. Versatiles tend to be senior authors associated with funding and supervision. Specialists are associated with 2 contrasting roles: the supervising role as team leaders or marginal and specialized contributors.