Articles

World Journal Awareness Day – Future Changes and Challenges

by B.H.S.Thimmappa

 Many international days dedicated to building awareness involving public education, visibility, and drawing attention to different causes are increasing every year. These awareness initiatives are essential to provide a platform to engage in public discussions and initiate a healthy conversation to enhance domain-specific exposure. They often can act as a vehicle to bring social change by building a bond among the stakeholders to improve our outlook. We can demonstrate our support for a particular scientific cause and make others understand the concept of proper paper publication ethics in science, engineering, and technology. In such awareness sessions, resource persons might reflect on their experiences and provide their valuable opinions for improvement through well-crafted strategies, tools, and insights required to transform our thinking and achieve specific research objectives. The differences and the diversity within the research community can be showcased and sensitize individuals, communities, and organizations towards the responsibility to do something serious and positive about the issue of fake journals. These awareness campaigns help develop a sense of community, support, and a moment to share our stories to foster substantially better performance. It shines a light on something we might not otherwise know about and inspire us to get involved in fruitful debates and meaningful discussions. The awareness of spurious journals, plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, image manipulation, and other types of research misconduct and ways to provide realistic solutions on how to build scientific bridges across India can create unity, exposure, and engagement. We are proposing to establish a new world day to be observed annually on November 12th to create awareness of good journals to publish scientific research output. Many standard journals are designed to inform scientific facts and stimulate the exchange of views. However, spurious journals pose multiple challenges in the era where there is a journal for every paper. No systematic and proper peer review process, exorbitant article processing charge (APC), questionable scientific quality of submitted manuscripts, and a clear commercial undertone are some of the issues plaguing recent predatory journals that disappear after a short life. Consequently, such journals are a serious challenge to the integrity of science, and it is extremely crucial for scientists, researchers, and academicians to be aware of this current scenario. A large number of retracted articles coming from India tarnish India’s image and conducting an unbiased assessment of their adverse impacts is the need of the hour. The quality of the journals published from the Indian soil requires close monitoring and course correction, capacity building, and progress through quality improvement towards ‘responsible publishing’. There is a need to build a strong journal club of science with a long-term strategy and academic activities to defend quality articles in standard journals intellectually and rededicate ourselves to the values of prompt reporting of scientific results for human welfare.

The journal awareness day can be defined as a brief exposure, high visibility program designed to stimulate thinking and discussion of certain journal risks and issues by large numbers of researchers is an intervention strategy well known to scientific research practitioners, education policymakers, and regular administrators. Journal awareness campaigns have the potential to increase knowledge about the root causes of publication misconduct and foster an educational environment that supports changes at the policy level and encourage research contributions to standard journals while placing substandard journals under the microscope. Choosing the right journal for the research output is essential to reach the broader scientific community, have more citations, have more local, national, and global impact, and have greater visibility. We need to select an appropriate journal based on the impact factor, indexing, and rank of a journal in a specific field (Quartiles: Q1, Q2, Q3, & Q4 i.e. top, mid-upper, mid-lower, and bottom positioning journals). Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) are considered the two most comprehensive bibliographic databases. These indexed journals are strict in their double-blind peer review process because they seek to publish high-standard research papers. Also, we have to select a journal that is relevant to particular subject areas and the paper content should fall within the scope of the specific journal. One breakthrough paper outweighs several routine papers in reporting research results and a hard-core paper in authentic journals can have a significant impact and can get recognition and rewards. The higher h-index of the individual authors, measuring both the productivity and the citation impact of the publications, reflects good journal quality.

These special days offer great potential to raise awareness and understanding of good scientific journals and mobilize support for suitable action, from the local community to the global platform. Understand the dynamics of diversity in the journals, proper journal selection and consequences of publishing in spurious journals, the role of professional society journals in quality control, critical analysis of journal quality, current developments in so-called international journals, distinguishing predatory journals from legitimate journals and bogus impact factors are some of the essential topics to discuss on a world journal awareness day. It is a platform to discuss the issues that researchers face in publishing a paper and provides suggestions on how the problems can be solved. This year’s theme could be “The Power of Quality Journals in a Changing World”. The policy of not compromising the quality of paper publications in higher education institutions and research organizations is expected to increase the number of good publications. A research policy that creates an incentive for faculty is more effective when compared to the regulatory approach of enforcing researchers to publish quality papers. Further, research misconduct such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and image manipulation by a researcher should be strongly discouraged through strict punishment policies at the university level. It is necessary for effecting long-term scientific goals since truth is encoded in human DNA and progressive policies in universities boost quality research outcomes across scientific disciplines. We can request the professional associations to conduct a refresher course in colleges to bring all the researchers on the same page for mainstream approval through a streamlining process to develop competence and confidence to publish only in quality journals and not succumb to the temptation of quick publications and publication pressure from the top management. A radical change in the mindset of Indian researchers is crucial to have a paradigm shift in the research direction and development of the true scientific spirit to carry out top-level future-oriented research activities with better and disruptive outcomes. It is essential to invest sufficient time and effort in scholarly writing and publishing the results that influence and impact the whole research community. Enhancing our research presence with greater awareness, critical reflection, and feedback from diverse peers is important in the research calendar. The right approach to building a strong research community is to have a clear message, narrative, and the vast machinery to gain momentum and join the stream in building a promising future for all the researchers through the journal club activities to be conducted in each of the higher education institutions of India. Research and investigation in the tried and tested trajectory and venturing out into new experimentation will open a new window of opportunities to enable us to spread our wings in value addition. India has all the potential to execute groundbreaking research projects and become a research powerhouse with breakthrough and transformative innovations. So work on big scientific ideas to have a bigger global impact and contribute outstanding research results in reputed journals for the greatest benefit of humankind. It is necessary to nurture the younger generation with an essential knowledge base and the right skills to face challenges with a growth mindset. All higher educational institutes should actively encourage publications in standard scientific journals that would pay off down the line. Get inspiration from the work culture of Nobel Prize winners and develop the right attitude toward research reporting. We have to pool the human resources to continue creativity, innovation and experimentation, and fact-based scientific analysis using advanced scientific systems leading to super-specializations to solve problems. Let us take this forward movement to transform our nation into a glorious future. Balance the brain and the body, mind and muscle, wisdom and work to become the ‘scientific research hub of the world’. Choose the journal that matters!

About the Author:

B.H.S. Thimmappa is a writer from Udupi, India

One Comment

  1. Pradip kumar Nath

    Thanks for serving timely. We all should have a clear idea upon it.