Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Exploring PubMed as a reliable resource for scholarly communications services'. Together they form a unique fingerprint. View full fingerprint. Journal of the Medical Library Association , 1 , Journal of the Medical Library Association.
You were searching a credentialing system. Its management also has advanced the cause of OA publishing, in both legitimate and controversial ways. PubMed inclusion has been used, for example, as an incentive for journals to include themselves in PubMed Central, eroding the idea that PubMed is a neutral arbiter of quality. Now, a new twist is emerging, and that seems to be that PubMed may be consciously or unwittingly acting as a facilitator of predatory or unscrupulous publishing.
In a paper published in Neuroscience , the authors analyzing the neurology and neuroscience journals included in PubMed found that:. Only citations for author manuscripts are included. This is the kind of fine print that will escape the attention of most users, and which itself is unclear as to reliability, process, or value.
The confusion is multi-layered for users. This study was published in April, but went largely unnoticed until the authors published on 19 August a letter based on the same research in the Lancet. In this letter, the authors state their recommendations thusly:. As one blogger notes about the study and the letter in the Lancet :. The PubMed database managers have irresponsibly allowed it to become a repository of citations to predatory journal articles. A mong other things, the next time you see a questionable journal proudly announcing that it is indexed in Pubmed, chances are that the journal is predatory.
Contrary to the popular notion that only genuine and distinguished journals which take peer-reviewing seriously and follow all the norms of scientific publishing are indexed in PubMed, many predatory journals too are included in PubMed.
The same holds true for PubMed Central too. This has real consequences. The National Institutes of Health, a division of the U. This again shows what a confusion of journals PubMed has become. It seems like an experiment that never took off, yet a Google search finds the page, an OMICS journal with a full accoutrement of PubMed elements is discoverable, and PubMed citations are easily retrieved. There are hundreds of entries for astrophysics, many of which seem irrelevant to biomedicine and life sciences.
In addition to the dubious role of certification databases when it comes to questionable journals, the role of scientists in the predatory publishing phenomenon is the subject of a recent article in Nature by David Moher, Larissa Shamseer, Kelly Cobey, and their colleagues.
In their review of nearly 2, biomedical articles from more than journals thought to be predatory, more than half of the corresponding authors hailed from high- and upper-middle-income countries using World Bank criteria.
This flies in the face of the common assumption that predatory publishers are exploiting desperate authors in low-income countries. The US itself produced more articles in this sample than any other country save India. The authors note:. Our experience with these journals is that they provide both poor vetting and poor access. Their websites and archiving systems are unstable.
Although some articles appear in PubMed often after a delay , the titles are not indexed by Medline and are difficult to find. The unifying theme I see is a hunger to adapt. At other times, these adaptations have revealed a clear lack of purpose and mission, such as the controversial involvement with eLife , the competition with publisher brands and traffic, and now the loose standards that have allowed unscrupulous publishers to enter PubMed via PMC.
Adaptation is required to remain relevant, but there have to be limits, or the adaptation may cause the entity to simply dissipate into the environment via entropy. PubMed seems to be giving into entropy. It needs to realize this moment calls for something else — clarity, standards, and credentialing that means something.
Their opportunity is not to follow, but to lead. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own. Thank you. It seems to me that once Pubmed decided to compete with commercial databases quality went out the window and quantity entered through the door. Thank you for writing about this. I became aware of the backdoor back in when a researcher friend told me about an article one of his post docs co-wrote in a journal not indexed in Medline.
For annual reviews my institutions now uses publication lists derived from Web of Science because they are interested the quality of the article and the journal. While many may disagree with the specific metrics used for impact factor at least it is a metric. Journals that are accepted into PMC go through a similar—but more recently implemented—appraisal process.
Accepted manuscripts, however, are deposited into PMC without review. According to Manca, content from predatory publishers likely seeps into PubMed via PMC, where he and his colleagues have been able to find papers from several predatory journals.
Sheehan tells The Scientist that the NLM is aware of concerns that articles from non-reputable journals are entering PubMed through that route. The concerns raised about low-quality content on PMC seeping onto PubMed spurred Peace Williamson , a medical librarian at the at the University of Texas at Arlington, and her colleague to investigate the composition of articles on PubMed, as well as quality-control procedures NLM had in place.
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