Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance最新文献

{"title":"An ethical analysis of student-faculty co‑authorships in manuscripts derived from PhD dissertations.","authors":"Hamed Bikaraan-Behesht, Keyvan Alasti, Mohammad Hosseini","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2747675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2747675","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A key ethical concern in PhD student-faculty (supervisee-supervisor) relationships is whether supervisors should be listed as co-authors on publications derived from dissertations. Some supervisors who engage in the research/revision of the dissertation and actively provide feedback might consider co-authorship as a fair recognition of their contributions. However, others might be less hands-on and yet, expect to be listed as co-authors. This issue is not directly addressed in authorship guidelines and codes of conduct. In this paper, we draw on the tasks that PhD supervisors should take on in dissertation work to explore the question: Under what circumstances can PhD supervisors be co-authors of manuscripts derived from dissertations? We argue that, although no universal criterion applies to all disciplines/contexts, from an ethical perspective, PhD supervisors can be co-authors only if they have made a meaningful contribution to dissertation work <i>without</i> undermining a supervisee's scholarly independence. Meaningful contribution could be based on active participation in conducting research or revising the dissertation text, but cannot be solely offered for guidance, commentary or general supervision. Independence could be defined differently depending on the dissertation type or context. Given the power imbalance between supervisors and supervisees, departments should provide guidance about these co-authorships.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2747675"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149185890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anticipating the unpredictable: A qualitative study on ethics experts' perspectives on review challenges related to AI.","authors":"Marija Franka Žuljević, Antonija Mijatović, Luciano D'andrea, Andrada Istrate, Nevien Kerk, Constantin Vică, Alexandra Zorilă, Hella von Unger, Ana Marušić","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2744222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2744222","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into research across disciplines, raising various ethical concerns related to bias, privacy, transparency, and accountability. However, less is known about how these challenges are addressed within research ethics review practices. This paper examines how ethics experts perceive and manage AI-related challenges in ethics review.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>Drawing on a qualitative study of 13 focus groups with 67 European ethics experts, we applied thematic analysis to identify key tensions shaping current review processes.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Our findings show that AI challenges basic assumptions of ethics review. Participants described AI as difficult to define, rapidly evolving, and not readily accommodated by ex-ante regulatory frameworks. Ethical issues were seen as emerging across the research lifecycle, often after initial review. This creates tensions between rule-based approaches, focused on compliance and risk minimization, and more trust-based models emphasizing researcher reflexivity and ongoing ethical judgment.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>We argue that AI highlights epistemic, temporal, and procedural limitations of existing ethics review systems. These findings suggest that ethics review of AI research may benefit from more anticipatory and flexible ethical governance, including iterative review mechanisms, interdisciplinary expertise, and continuous ethical engagement throughout the research process.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2744222"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149139063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How to categorize citation irregularities: A proposal based on an exploration of the literature.","authors":"Qilin Zhang, Yitong Li, Lex Bouter","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2654564","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2654564","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Backgorund: </strong>Citation irregularities undermine the fairness and reliability of scholarly communication, yet the terms used to describe these behaviors remain fragmented and inconsistently defined.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>We employed a backward‑snowballing strategy to identify relevant publications on the historical development of views on citation irregularities, with particular attention to the literal meaning and the conceptual evolution of terms.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Through an inductive analysis of the 50 distinct terms identified, we propose a classification consisting of nine categories: mis-citation, citation distortion, uncritical citation, irrelevant citation, excessive self-citation, citation manipulation, selective citation, coercive citation, and bibliographic plagiarism.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>The classification functions as a multi‑dimensional descriptive tool, and an instance of citation irregularity may fall into more than one category. This classification helps to clarify citation irregularities and provides a structured framework for understanding their underlying patterns.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2654564"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147596013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Opening Pandora's box: Paper mills in conference proceedings.","authors":"Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová, Yagmur Ozturk, Solal Pirelli","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Objective: </strong>Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scientific subfields. This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>We collected publication offers for more than 4,000 unique paper titles or topics from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>We identified 2,062 papers in 366 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.5% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are coauthored by more than 7,500 researchers from over 2,000 institutions or companies in 56 countries. The identified papers demonstrate collaboration anomalies, high diversity of affiliations per paper, citation manipulation, a predominance of six-author papers, and content irregularities.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Our findings show that paper mills are a large, organized, and often public market that commercializes scientific misconduct.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2733727"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149118198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The phenomenon of 'value extraction' in Open Access.","authors":"Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, Nikola Biller-Andorno","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2661668","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2661668","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Open Access (OA) agreements were introduced to remove financial barriers to scientific dissemination and promote equity in knowledge access. As Article Processing Charges (APCs) have shifted from individual researchers to institutions, access to OA publishing has become an institutional asset, unevenly distributed across institutions, countries, and career stages.</p><p><strong>Purpose: </strong>This article introduces and defines value extraction in OA - the use of access to APC coverage as leverage to obtain authorship or corresponding authorship without proportional intellectual contribution - and examines it as a structurally enabled integrity risk distinct from previously described forms of authorship abuse.</p><p><strong>Approach: </strong>We conduct a conceptual and normative analysis of the mechanisms by which OA agreements interact with metric-driven academic evaluation systems and existing research integrity frameworks, identifying governance gaps and distributional inequities produced by these interactions.</p><p><strong>Findings: </strong>Value extraction in OA is enabled by the convergence of three factors: centralized APC control within institutions, performance metrics that privilege publication counts and corresponding authorship, and integrity frameworks that treat publishing infrastructure as an ethically neutral background condition. Researchers at less-resourced institutions, early-career researchers, and scholars in the Global South face heightened vulnerability. Existing authorship guidelines fail to address mechanisms in which infrastructural access - rather than hierarchy or prestige - functions as leverage for academic credit.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Safeguards are needed at institutional, publisher, and systemic levels, including procedural firewalls between APC decisions and authorship documentation, publisher-level monitoring of authorship patterns, and reform of evaluation frameworks to decouple infrastructural access from academic credit. Future research should investigate the prevalence of value extraction using bibliometric and network-based screening approaches.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2661668"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147788233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Faculty-student differences in authorship perceptions before and after authorship ethics interventions.","authors":"Elise Demeter, George Banks, Andrew McBride, Holly Holladay-Sandidge, Katherine Hall-Hertel, Lisa Rasmussen","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2651757","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2651757","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Authorship practices in collaborative research teams are often complex and influence perceptions surrounding fairness, responsibility, and accountability in scholarly work. This study investigates prevailing authorship norms, the frequency of authorship disagreements, and differences in authorship perceptions across faculty and student roles, genders, and disciplinary contexts. Survey results reveal systematic differences, particularly between faculty and students, in how authorship distribution is perceived and how different types of researcher contributions are valued toward authorship credit. We further assess changes in authorship norms and ethical perceptions through a follow-up survey after a three-year effort to improve authorship ethics on our campus, which included training on ethical authorship practices and adoption of a formal institutional authorship policy. The results show notable shifts in researchers' awareness, expectations, and attitudes toward authorship ethics and responsibilities. This suggests proactive education and policymaking can promote integrity in collaborative scholarly work and recalibrate local norms. Based on these insights, we offer recommendations for supporting transparent authorship communication and fostering more ethical research environments.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2651757"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147596054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Possible misplaced perception of moral shame in AI-use disclosure.","authors":"Bor Luen Tang","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2679554","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2679554","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The concept of a moral shame associated with the disclosure of artificial intelligence (AI) use in research, as articulated by Bao and Zeng (\"AI disclosure, moral shame, and the punishment of honesty. Accountability in Research, https://doi-org/10.1080/08989621.2025.2542197) is in line with other related notions such as AI guilt, and calls for improvements in AI-use policies and guidelines. Here, I note a potentially paradoxical nature of such moral shame, which I would argue is somewhat in tension with simply being honest. From both research integrity or social epistemological perspectives, moral shame associated with AI-used could be a misconception on the part of the individual that arises from 1) a poor grasp of research integrity and/or 2) an epistemic failure to recognize AI writing assistants for what they really are. These two sources of misconception would need addressing.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2679554"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148007298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can aspects of predatory publishing be applied to some mainstream and grey journals?","authors":"Simon Turner","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2644380","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2644380","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Since the term predatory publishing was coined in the early 2010s, a significant research literature has emerged that carries warnings about journals issued by such publishers, while signaling the virtues of mainstream publishing. Three narratives that support the negative framing of predatory journals were identified: (1) they prioritize profit over scholarship; (2) they are assessed using qualitative warning signs rather than robust quality indicators; and (3) they are seldom named in editorial interventions, generating uncertainty about the domain of predatory publishing.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>Challenges of differentiating between the quality standards of mainstream and other journals are examined by applying a \"warning list\" of criteria to a grey publisher representative of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate publishing, then analyzing editorial and production attributes of a cross-section of health science journals, with a range of impact factors, indexed within a bibliometric database.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Use of predatory \"warning signs\" has affected progress with evaluating the relative qualities of mainstream and other journals, and meant that some innovations associated with some non-mainstream journals have been overlooked (e.g. process efficiencies in peer review and the sharing of production process data).</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Sources of editorial and production practice data for comparing all journals are incomplete and dispersed. More complete quality indicators for <i>all</i> journals that include authors' experiences of publishing need to be openly shared and externally validated. Research funders can influence publishers' behavior by making open access funding contingent upon journals meeting both <i>quality</i> and <i>timeliness</i> indicators for peer review.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2644380"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147460839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Showcasing research achievements and safeguarding research integrity: How do Chinese universities fare?","authors":"Shaoxiong Brian Xu, Yunru Chen, Weiming Liu, Zimeng Lai, Guangwei Hu","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2654563","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2654563","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Despite the importance of showcasing research achievements and safeguarding research integrity, our understanding of how Chinese universities navigate these potentially competing priorities remains limited.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>In response, this study investigated 579 Chinese universities on the 2024 Stanford lists of the world's top 2% scientists (WTSs) and operationalized their fulfillment of the dual priorities in terms of institutional visibility (i.e. public institutional responses to the release of the 2024 Stanford lists of WTSs and to the government requirements for safeguarding research integrity) and institutional responsiveness (i.e. promptness in publishing news reports featuring WTSs and releasing annual research integrity reports). In this connection, three types of publicly accessible official documents were analyzed: 1) news reports featuring WTSs, 2) academic integrity webpages, and 3) annual research integrity reports disclosing integrity investigations.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Among these universities, 28.5% published news reports featuring WTSs, 52.8% maintained academic integrity webpages, and 16.8% released annual research integrity reports. Furthermore, significant variations were found across four contextual factors: university prestige (elite universities vs. non-elite universities), retraction status (universities hosting retraction-afflicted WTSs vs. universities hosting retraction-free WTSs), the number of WTSs, and the prevalence of retraction-afflicted WTSs.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2654563"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147678355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is it plagiarism if the material was previously published by a third party?","authors":"Jeffrey I Seeman, Mark C House","doi":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2652499","DOIUrl":"10.1080/08989621.2026.2652499","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Is it plagiarism if the material was previously published by a third party (other than the claimant)? This scenario is of interest as a model for an assertion that involves the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>A survey was conducted on whether (a) there should be a statute of limitations on allegations of plagiarism and (b) an allegation of plagiarism should be deemed unfounded, unsubstantiated, or not proven when the alleged plagiarized ideas, processes, results, or words had been previously published in the scientific literature by an individual other than the alleged victim of the claimed plagiarism.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>We received 287 complete responses. In all the survey questions but one, that dealing with statute of limitations on claims of plagiarism (\"No\"), a range of responses were obtained. About 40% of the respondents considered that unacknowledged communication of another's <i>unoriginal</i> ideas to be plagiarism, even when the content being alleged to have been plagiarized had been previously published by a third party <i>and</i> that the claimant acknowledged that they were aware of that previous disclosure by a third party.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Two major recommendations were made: education in RCR should be required for both students and faculty; and the evidentiary standard for establishing research misconduct should be increased.</p>","PeriodicalId":50927,"journal":{"name":"Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance","volume":" ","pages":"2652499"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147647428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}