Quality Of Submissions Research Articles

What is a fatal flaw? A guide for authors & reviewers

What is a fatal flaw? A guide for authors & reviewers

Organisational Culture and Bank Risk

Existing research has largely relied on employee surveys to measure organisational culture despite the significant shortcomings of this approach. We use multiple, unobtrusive sources of data to gain rich insights into bank culture without ever having to ask employees to ‘show us your culture’. Our measure is based on 20 individual indicators from six different sources, including information on internal fraud cases, customer complaints, and the quality of regulatory submissions. We use this data to investigate the hypothesised relationship between organisational culture and bank risk. We find robust evidence that poor culture leads to substantially higher risk, demonstrating the importance of bank culture for prudential outcomes.

Attitudes of physicians and scientists to peer reviewing for biomedical journals: A survey from the Middle East and Africa

Introduction: Peer review is vital to the scientific publishing process. However, the present system has been criticized and accused of bias, lack of transparency, and failure to detect significant breakthroughs. Peer reviewers usually work pro bono, and their efforts are not formally acknowledged. Some journals have difficulty finding appropriate reviewers who can complete timely reviews, resulting in significant publication delay. Materials and Methods: An online survey of a convenience sample of clinicians and biomedical scientists from the Middle East (107) and Africa (69) was conducted to explore why reviewers decline to review and to ascertain their opinions on reviewer incentives. Items were scored on 5-point Likert scales, with low scores indicating low importance or low agreement. Results: One hundred and seventy two respondents provided adequate responses for analysis. Factors rated most highly in importance for the decision to accept to review a paper included contribution of the paper to the subject area (69.8%), the relevance of the topic to own work (66.0%), and desire to keep up to date with research (63.8%). The most highly rated factor that was important in the decision to decline to review was conflict with other workloads (69.4%), followed by low quality of submissions and tight time scale (65.8% for both), and lack of interest (65.1%). Most respondents agreed that financial incentives would not be effective when time constraints are prohibitive. However, reviewers agreed that nonfinancial incentives might encourage reviewers to accept requests to review: annual acknowledgment on the journal's website (78.5%), more feedback about the outcome of the submission (74.3%) and quality of the review (73.0%), appointment of reviewers to the journal's editorial board (69.1%), and being offered free subscription to the journal content (68.7%). Conclusions: Reviewers are more likely to accept to review a manuscript when it is relevant to their area of interest. Lack of time is the principal factor in the decision to decline. Reviewing should be formally recognized by academic institutions, and journals should acknowledge reviewers' work.

Passing the torch of the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research—Part A

The field of biomaterials science is a constant wonder, with the advent or application of new chemistries; novel methods to characterize biomaterials in unprecedented resolution; and exciting applications of existing, composite, or innovative biomaterials to biomedical problems. The journal will continue to publish original contributions concerning studies of the preparation, performance, and evaluation of biomaterials and the response of blood and tissues to biomaterials. In addition, interdisciplinary areas are covered, such as tissue engineering, medical devices, and controlled release technology where biomaterials play a significant role. We welcome high-quality submissions by investigators throughout the world who are making exciting advancements in these areas. The journal will also continue to publish award-winning papers selected annually by SFB, as well as timely and critical review articles. Over the last several years, the publication landscape for biomaterials research has grown substantially and provides many opportunities to publish one's work. Such decisions are made for many reasons, including the publication process, perceptions of journal impact, alignment with a professional society, turnaround time for decision, ability to effectively reach one's target audience, and visibility of the work. As the official journal of the SFB, I aim to ensure that JBMR Part A is at the top of every author's list when considering where to submit their best work. We can accomplish this by (a) identifying, inviting, and accepting high quality work; (b) publishing articles that are of wide interest; and (c) increasing the visibility and contributions of accepted articles. We have identified a collection of new Associate Editors, representing the breadth of research within our discipline. Along with myself, these individuals will be tasked with managing the review process closely in order to ensure the quality and rigor of submissions and accelerate our time to first decision. It is my goal that all submissions to the journal receive a first decision in less than 1 month. Furthermore, we have empowered Associate Editors to personally solicit submissions at scientific meetings and to also reach decisions based on their own evaluation of submissions. We need to continue striving to decrease turnaround time, increase diversity of submissions, and ensure that only high-quality papers are published. It is imperative that we accelerate publication if we are to elevate the journal to the highest level. In addition, we will use social media and other platforms to highlight the publication of new work in the journal and amplify its reach throughout the community. I will regularly evaluate the composition of our Editorial Board to ensure its involvement in our mission. Participation on our Editorial Board is an honor and recognition of great accomplishments in our discipline, and I will leverage this expertise in several ways. I will call upon the Board for advice and suggestions to continually improve all aspects of the journal. Members of the Board will be asked to evaluate papers in a timely manner. Emerging initiatives will include a reviewer mentoring program to provide personal training on best practices for reviewing papers in the journal, where trainees will be selected and matched with members of the Board. This will provide an opportunity to enhance reviewer expertise and build a connection between trainees and the journal as a preferred target for submitting manuscripts. These initiatives will empower the Board to have a lasting, positive influence on the future of the journal. Such a venture requires the participation of many individuals. Our publisher Wiley is continually working to streamline the submission process to make the submission of your manuscript faster and more efficient. Our Associate Editors and Editorial Board work hard in this largely volunteer effort because of their commitment to our discipline. Our scientific community should submit our best work to JBMR Part A and say “yes” when asked to serve as reviewers. Your reviews should be thoughtful, accurate, and returned in a timely manner to improve the quality of the work and shorten the review time. We must continue to improve the quality of work published in our journal through critical discussions at annual meetings, effective reviews of submitted papers, and referencing papers from our journal in other publications. I look forward to representing our societies and discipline in this important role and partnering with Wiley Publishing to expand the reach of our journal around the globe. It is an exciting time in our field. Please embrace the JBMR Part A and help us reach the heights that our journal deserves. Onward and upward! Kent

A Systematic Review of Quality Improvement Interventions in Burn Care

Abstract Quality improvement interventions (QIIs) are intended to improve the care of patients. Unlike most traditional clinical research, these endeavors emphasize the sustainable implementation of scientific evidence rather than the establishment of evidence. Our purpose was to conduct a systematic review of QII publications in the field of burn care. A systematic review was conducted utilizing electronic databases (MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane Library) of all studies relating to “quality improvement” in burn care published until March 31, 2020. Studies were excluded if no baseline data were reported, or if no intervention was applied and tested. Studies were scored using a novel 10-point evaluation system for QII. We evaluated 414 studies involving “quality improvement” in burn care. Only 82 studies contained a QII while 332 studies were categorized as traditional research. Several traditional research studies made claims to be QIIs, but few met the criteria. Of the 82 QII references, only 20 (24%) were accessible as full-text manuscripts, the remainder were published as abstracts only. The mean score was 7.95 for full-text studies (range 6–10) and 7.4 for abstract-only studies (range 5.5–9.5). Despite the importance of quality improvement (QI) in burn care, very few studies have been published that employ true QI methodology, and many QII studies never advance beyond publication as abstracts in conference proceedings. Based on this systematic review, we propose guidelines to improve the quality of QII submissions.

RETRACTED: Development and application of VR course resources based on embedded system in open education

Virtual Reality VR technology offers a unique approach to enhance the use of complex 3D graphics and visualization environments. The study conducted using virtual reality (VR) technology integrated into the computer-aided design network; VR is a Web-based learning environment. Virtual reality technology is expected to be a traditional 2D computer graphics (CG) CG extended to a 3D real-time simulation program. Virtual reality technology can be used to promote participation and student learning. With VR education, change the delivery of educational content. No user interaction is well suited to see it and is very suitable to create a real or imaginary virtual world. Immersive virtual reality (VR) applications require ultra-high data rate and low latency to run smoothly, designed to improve multiuser wireless VR video (depth of learning support system) VR experiences. It has been proposed streaming: quality and low-latency video block submission. Scenario, VR is that it can describe some fields to be widely applied to education. One of the main features of VR is that it allows for multisensory interaction in the visualization space. This combination of visualization and interactive cosmetic VR of multisensory is, ideally, to see whether suitable for effective learning and try to explain this effect by the benefits of active learning from experience. Also, may want to consider some of the defenders and the application of VR education related to technology-related lottery.

Learning to be Editors

Learning to be Editors

The Effect of Corporate Governance Mechanism and Submission Quality of Financial Report on the Financial report Integrity Moderated with Political Connection

This study aims to determine the role of corporate governance mechanisms and the quality of financial report submission on financial report integrity by placing political connections as a moderating variable. The research method used is a quantitative method, with the unit of analysis being the company. The sample selection technique is purposive sampling, the selected sample is 43 manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange for the 2015-2019 period, so the number of observation data is 215 annual data. The data analysis used is panel data regression. The results of the study indicate that the corporate governance mechanism is not entirely able to provide a positive correlation to improving the integrity of financial statements, one of which is that independent commissioners may not be able to balance the decision-making process and to protect the rights of stakeholders, especially minority shareholders. Political connections are also very important to be a concern because they can influence existing governance, to improve reports with high integrity. This finding is very useful for investors to be careful in understanding the information contained in the financial statements because the corporate governance mechanism and the existence of political connections can affect its integrity. This political connection is often considered to weaken the mechanism of good corporate governance and the quality of the submission of financial reports which in turn can reduce the existence of the high financial report integrity.

Communication clarity in calls for papers issued by journal special issues: First impressions matter

The purpose of this study was to examine communication clarity in calls for papers issued by peer reviewed journals for special issues. I wanted to explore what could hinder and help guest editors to communicate their intent to potential contributors. I searched peer reviewed journals in the field of human resource management published by five leading publishers, including Emerald, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Elsevier. Forty‐seven journals were identified, and the sample included 33 calls for papers that I examined using content analysis. The results showed that many guest editors include a problem statement; purpose statement including explicative statements and specifications; and research questions, topics, or themes. Based on this result, I created a composite profile that describes how guest editors typically craft their calls, including the average number of sources, topics, and paragraphs. I also identified eight additional tools guest editors use to increase clarity of their calls. Additionally, my analysis indicated that guest editors vary greatly in their approaches to crafting calls for papers. I identified a number of inconsistencies, inaccuracies, omissions, and redundancies that could confuse or discourage potential contributors. Journal editors could use the results of this study to examine their editorial strategies and practices and revise and improve their guidelines and templates related to special issues and their calls. Special issue guest editors might use the study results to increase the chances of receiving quality submissions.

Addressing the quality of submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov for registration and results posting: The use of a checklist.

US Federal regulations since the late 1990s have required registration of some clinical trials and submission of results for some of these trials on a public registry, ClinicalTrials.gov. The quality of the submissions made to ClinicalTrials.gov determines the duration of the Quality Control review, whether the submission will pass the review (success), and how many review cycles it will take for a study to be posted. Success rate for all results submitted to ClinicalTrials.gov is less than 25%. To increase the success of investigators' submissions and meet the requirements of registration and submission of results in a timely fashion, the Johns Hopkins ClinicalTrials.gov Program implemented a policy to review all studies for quality before submission. To standardize our review for quality, minimize inter-reviewer variability, and have a tool for training new staff, we developed a checklist. The Program staff learned from major comments received from ClinicalTrials.gov and also reviewed the Protocol Registration and Results System review criteria for registration and results to fully understand how to prepare studies to pass Quality Control review. These were summarized into bulleted points and incorporated into a checklist used by Program staff to review studies before submission. In the period before the introduction of the checklist, 107 studies were submitted for registration with a 45% (48/107) success rate, a mean (SD) of 18.9 (26.72) days in review, and 1.74 (0.78) submission cycles. Results for 44 records were submitted with 11% (5/44) success rate, 115.80 (129.33) days in review, and 2.23 (0.68) submission cycles. In the period after the checklist, 104 studies were submitted for registration with 80% (83/104) success rate, 2.12 (3.85) days in review, and 1.22 (0.46) submission cycles. Results for 22 records were submitted with 41% (9/22) success rate, 39.27 (19.84) days in review, and 1.64 (0.58) submission cycles. Of the 44 results submitted prior to the checklist, 30 were Applicable or Probable Applicable Clinical Trials, with 10% (3/30) being posted within 30 days as required of the National Institutes of Health. For the 22 results submitted after the checklist, 17 were Applicable or Probable Applicable Clinical Trials, with 47% (8/17) being posted within 30 days of submission. These pre- and post-checklist differences were statistically significant improvements. The checklist has substantially improved our success rate and contributed to a reduction in the review days and number of review cycles. If Academic Medical Centers and industry will adopt or create a similar checklist to review their studies before submission, the quality of the submissions can be improved and the duration of review can be minimized.

Hidden Liquidity, Market Quality, and Order Submission Strategies

Using a recent pilot program as an exogenous shock to hidden liquidity, we show that hidden liquidity has significant effects on various measures of market quality and order submission strategies after controlling for market volatility and other stock attributes. Spreads, depths, trading volume, and trade size increase with hidden liquidity. The extent of informed trading and the price impact of a trade also increase with hidden liquidity. Traders use more inside-the-quote limit orders, and algorithmic traders engage in more pinging activities and raise message traffic when there is more hidden liquidity.

EJHPgains MEDLINE listing

I am delighted to announce to readers of the journal that EJHP has been approved by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for MEDLINE listing. This is a significant milestone and I want to acknowledge the contribution of three groups for this attainment. First, the authors have responded to challenges to produce high-quality research such that we have a rich source of material to consider for publication. I continue to be impressed by the high quality and methodological rigour of many submissions. Second, I want to praise the BMJ team who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes over the last few years to achieve this. Third, my thanks go to the editorial team, whose breadth of experience and expertise ensures that the content of each issue is of high quality and where … Correspondence to Professor Philip Wiffen, Pain Research Unit, Churchill Hospital, Oxford OX3 7LE, UK; pwiffen{at}oxfordsrs.org.uk

Lessons Learned From an Intensive Writing Training Course for Applied Epidemiologists.

Although writing is a valued public health competency, authors face a multitude of barriers (eg, lack of time, lack of mentorship, lack of appropriate instruction) to publication. Few writing courses for applied public health professionals have been documented. In 2017 and 2018, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention partnered to implement a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Intensive Writing Training course to improve the quality of submissions from applied epidemiologists working at health departments. The course included 3 webinars, expert mentorship from experienced authors, and a 2-day in-person session. As of April 2020, 39 epidemiologists had participated in the course. Twenty-four (62%) of the 39 epidemiologists had submitted manuscripts, 17 (71%) of which were published. The program's evaluation demonstrates the value of mentorship and peer feedback during the publishing process, the importance of case study exercises, and the need to address structural challenges (eg, competing work responsibilities or supervisor support) in the work environment.

Editorial

My first year as editor of Boyhood Studies has flown by. I am really pleased with the issues we have put out since I came on board and the progress we have made in terms of the quality, rigor, and consistency of submissions. I think it is important as an interdisciplinary international journal that we continue to represent work in the field from multiple perspectives. Before I turn to outline this issue in detail, I want to briefly highlight the exciting plans we have coming up for out next two issues (13.2 and 14.1), which will both be special issues focusing on the work of one of the leading masculinities scholars of the past 30 years, Raewyn Connell.

Bug Bounty Programs for Cybersecurity: Practices, Issues, and Recommendations

Drawing upon crowdsourcing, bug bounty programs (BBPs) are entering the mainstream security practice in organizations. We analyze and recommend best practices in five main BBP areas: scoping of BBPs, timing of crowd engagement, submission quality, firm-researcher communication, and hacker motivation.

A reply from a ‘pracademic’: It is not all mischief, and there is scope to educate budding authors

Problemification: Some academics joined the profession from private sector late in their career. They are sometimes referred to fondly as practical academics or ‘pracademics’ because they still work in private sector and also act as a visiting professor in academia. I sit on eight boards and chair nearly half of them, and serve on audit committees and HR Remuneration committees. I am an example of a ‘pracademic’, and my induction into academia was one sentence – publish or perish. In the private sector, induction can take up to a week. I had one minute.Implications: The implication is that I had to find out what a peer-reviewed journal was and trip into the fact that some peer-reviewed journals are scams and others A rated. Telling the difference in my initial years took its toll. I continually had to ask colleagues – is this journal real? Eventually I realised the DHET list was a good starting point and I started submitting articles. I got more rejections than acceptances at first, with very little explanation. So I learnt nothing and did not know what to do to improve. I had to waste another thousand reviewer hours of time to learn what the requirement was.Research writing is guided by a personal philosophy, and it is about what types of research issues one is inclined towards. For instance, some people are naturally inclined towards basic research and others towards applied research. Others are more oriented towards theory building and testing types for the purpose of creating knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Some others are pragmatic types or realist types and believe real-world problems do not come neatly packaged and are somewhat untidily in presentation calling for discretion or judgement on what to prioritise for research and how to carry out the research. Some are scientist practitioners (evidence informed researchers) and others are practitioner-scientist (practice-led science).Perhaps this kind of orientation to research is what early career researchers need initially; then, they can worry about reproducibility of research findings down the line after grounding themselves into the research space they perceive to belong to and where they feel invested.Purpose: The purpose of this opinion article is to share my journey and sow some doubt in reply to the opinion piece circulated by Efendic and Van Zyl. Whilst I do agree with everything that is said in their article, I believe that there is additional information that needs to be considered. Context is important. Not all academics that submit articles have been in academia for many years. We need to do more to support budding authors.Recommendations: We need to be much more helpful to budding authors than just publishing a page or two called author submission guidelines. These are mostly cosmetic style guides. If we want a higher quality submission and plenty of them – then I believe we need to educate our budding authors of the requirements. Perhaps we need a detailed guide, similar in content and depth as the article of Efendic and Van Zyl (2019). We could consider a podcast setting out the technical guidelines and statistical requirements. Running courses on article publishing by the reviewers is important because that is from the horse’s mouth. Trust me; it is not just a case of sticking to the style guide. You need to really understand some of the under currents of article publishing, for example, quoting as many authors from that particular journal’s list of articles as possible.

What Do Neighbors Tell About You: The Local Context of Cis-Regulatory Modules Complicates Prediction of Regulatory Variants.

Many problems of modern genetics and functional genomics require the assessment of functional effects of sequence variants, including gene expression changes. Machine learning is considered to be a promising approach for solving this task, but its practical applications remain a challenge due to the insufficient volume and diversity of training data. A promising source of valuable data is a saturation mutagenesis massively parallel reporter assay, which quantitatively measures changes in transcription activity caused by sequence variants. Here, we explore the computational predictions of the effects of individual single-nucleotide variants on gene transcription measured in the massively parallel reporter assays, based on the data from the recent “Regulation Saturation” Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation challenge. We show that the estimated prediction quality strongly depends on the structure of the training and validation data. Particularly, training on the sequence segments located next to the validation data results in the “information leakage” caused by the local context. This information leakage allows reproducing the prediction quality of the best CAGI challenge submissions with a fairly simple machine learning approach, and even obtaining notably better-than-random predictions using irrelevant genomic regions. Validation scenarios preventing such information leakage dramatically reduce the measured prediction quality. The performance at independent regulatory regions entirely excluded from the training set appears to be much lower than needed for practical applications, and even the performance estimation will become reliable only in the future with richer data from multiple reporters. The source code and data are available at https://bitbucket.org/autosomeru_cagi2018/cagi2018_regsat and https://genomeinterpretation.org/content/expression-variants.

Manitoba Law Journal: Criminal Law Edition (Robson Crim) 2019 Volume 42(3), Special Issue

We are thrilled to bring you the latest edition of the Criminal Law Special Edition of the Manitoba Law Journal. Academics, students and the practicing bench and bar continue to access this publication and contribute to it their knowledge and experience in the criminal law. The fact that we have, once again, elected to publish a double volume is a testament to the quality of submissions we have received over the last twelve months. We present twenty-five articles from twenty-nine authors, highlighting the work of some of Canada’s leading criminal law, criminological and criminal justice academics. The Manitoba Law Journal remains one of the most important legal scholarship platforms in Canada with a rich history of hosting criminal law analyses.1 With the help of our contributors, the Manitoba Law Journal was recently ranked second out of thirty-one entries in the Law, Government and Politics category of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). We continue to be committed to open access scholarship and our readership grows with each Criminal Law Special Edition released.

A qualitative inquiry into implementing an electronic health record system (SmartCare) for prevention of mother-to-child transmission data in Zambia: a retrospective study

ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the challenges in implementing a Zambian electronic health records (EHR) system labelled ‘SmartCare’ from diverse stakeholder perspectives in order to improve prevention of mother-to-child transmission...

Evaluating the potential effect of the increased importance of the impact component in the Research Excellence Framework of the UK

The UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a system that is intended to evaluate the quality of the research produced by higher education institutes (HEIs) in the UK in three areas: quality of research outputs; impact of this research beyond academia; and research environment. For the next REF, the funding bodies have reviewed the importance of the three assessment elements and decided to increase the weight of ‘impact’ to 25% (from 20% in REF2014) and decrease the weight of ‘outputs’ to 60% (from 65% in REF2014). This article first examines the relevance of some factors for the quality of impact submissions in REF2014 and finds that larger submissions and institutes with higher external research income received better impact scores in the REF. The article then examines the units of assessment (UoAs) and HEIs that benefitted from the inclusion of the impact agenda as part of REF2014 by examining the distribution of the quality‐related research (QR) funding in the 2017–2018 period and finds that the QR funding gap among different UoAs tends to decrease but the gap among HEIs in most of the UoAs increased. With the increased importance of the impact agenda as a criterion for funding bodies, it is expected that research income will be concentrated in fewer universities in the future, with the increased importance of non‐academic impact. This article also discusses some of the gaming strategies and long‐term investment priorities that HEIs may engage in based on the new submission rules of the next REF.