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Scientific Literature[edit source]

Scientific Literature is the published form of original scientific research. scientific literature is everything that is read that involves the acquiring of knowledge from 10 different forms of scientific literature. Methods of research and writing are shared between researchers and scientists such as IMRAD and the method of which research is conducted. It is important to avoid unethical practices when publishing work.

Purpose[edit source]

Scientific research has the goal to be published, it is not concluded until the results have been published. An informal law of original research is for it to be published into Scientific literature. Scientific Literature is different from normal literature because when writing scientific literature you are not supposed to write about why you did something but instead about how and what you did to create reproducibility. A scientist must do and write science, not just perform an experiment. Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within an academic field, often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of contributing to the results of one's research into the literature, which often requires a peer-review process.

Categories of Literature[edit source]

Original scientific research published for the first time in scientific journals is called the primary literature. Patents and technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software), can also be considered primary literature. Secondary sources include review articles (which summarize the findings of published studies to highlight advances and new lines of research) and books (for large projects or broad arguments, including compilations of articles). Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption.

Structure[edit source]

The structure of scientific articles is laid out using the acronym IMRAD, which details the four parts of an article: the introduction, the methodology, the results, and the discussion. Almost like the standard form of writing a high school, essay which would be the topic paragraph, the body paragraph, and finally the conclusion. The importance of IMRAD in scientific writing is the questions the writer proposes to himself, which is different from standard writing.

Types of scientific publications

Scientific literature can include the following kinds of publications:

• scientific articles published in scientific journals
• patents specialized for science and technology (for example, biological patents and chemical patents)
• books wholly written by one or a small number of co-authors
• edited volumes, where each chapter is the responsibility of a different author or set of authors, while the editor is responsible for determining the scope of the project, keeping the work on schedule, and ensuring consistency of style and content
• presentations at academic conferences, especially those organized by learned societies
• government reports such as a forensic investigation conducted by a government agency such as the NTSB
• scientific publications on the World Wide Web
• books, technical reports, pamphlets, and working papers issued by individual researchers or research organizations on their own initiative; these are sometimes organised into a series
• blogs and science forums

Literature may also be published in areas considered to be "grey", as they are published outside of traditional channels. This material is traditionally not indexed by major databases and can include manuals, theses and dissertations, or newsletters and bulletins.

The significance of different types of the scientific publications can vary between disciplines and change over time. According to James G. Speight and Russell Foote, peer-reviewed journals are the most prominent and prestigious form of publication.

Scientific papers and articles

There are ten different types of scientific papers. Eight of these carry specific objectives, while the other two can vary depending on the style and the intended goal.

Papers that carry specific objectives are:

• The original article provides new information from original research usually supported by statistics.
• case reports are unique events that researchers look at to gain information on what they are researching.
• technical notes this is a description of a technique or piece of equipment that has been modified from an existing one to be new and more effective.
• pictorial essay are a series of images high in quality that's goal is to teach what the pictures are of.
• review is a detailed analysis of recent developments on a topic.
• commentary is a short summery of an author's personal experience.
• editorials are short reviews or critiques of original articles.
• letters to the editor, these are comments directed to the editor of an article to ask questions and provide constructive criticism.

These two have varying types of scientific classifications and can range from historical articles to speeches:

• other. Other types of papers not listed under non scientific material or any of the 8 above types of scientific publications are put into this category and vary depending on the objective and style of the article.
• nonscientific material. This type of material comes from the result of an article being published. it does not advance an article scientifically but instead contributes to its reputation as a scientific article.

Peer Review[edit source]

Main article: Scholarly peer review

Though peer review and the learned journal format are not themselves an essential part of scientific literature, they are both convenient ways of ensuring that the above fundamental criteria are met. They are essentially a means of quality control, a term which also encompasses other means towards the same goal.

The "quality" being referred to here is the scientific one, which consists of transparency and repeatability of the research for independent verification, the validity of the conclusions and interpretations drawn from the reported data, the overall importance for advance within a given field of knowledge, novelty, and in certain fields applicability as well. The lack of peer review is what makes most technical reports and World Wide Web publications unacceptable as contributions to the literature. The relatively weak peer review often applied to books and chapters in edited books means that their status is also second-tier unless an author's personal standing is so high that prior achievement and a continued stake in one's reputation within the scientific community signals a clear expectation of quality.

The emergence of institutional digital repositories where scholars can post their work as it is submitted to a print-based journal has taken formal peer review into a state of flux. Though publicizing a preprint online does not prevent it from being peer reviewed, it does allow an unreviewed copy to be widely circulated. On the positive side this change has led to the faster dissemination of novel work within the scientific community; on the negative, it has made it more difficult to discern a valid scientific contribution from the unmeritorious.

Increasing reliance on abstracting services, especially on those available electronically, means that the effective criterion for whether a publication format forms part of the established, trusted literature is whether it is covered by these services; in particular, by the specialised service for the discipline concerned such as Chemical Abstracts Service, and by the major interdisciplinary services such as those marketed by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Ethics[edit]

The transfer of copyright from author to publisher, used by some journals, can be controversial because many authors want to propagate their ideas more widely and re-use their material elsewhere without the need for permission. Usually an author or authors circumvent that problem by rewriting an article and using other pictures. Some publishers may also want publicity for their journal so will approve facsimile reproduction unconditionally; other publishers are more resistant.^{[citation needed]}

In terms of research publications, a number of key issues include and are not restricted to:

• Honesty. Honesty and integrity is a duty of each author and person, expert-reviewer and member of journal editorial boards.
• Review process. The peer-review process contributes to the quality control and it is an essential step to ascertain the standing and originality of the research.
  • Redundant Publications. Publications that contain copyrighted and new unpublished material.
  • Data Fabrications. Is the process of purposefully changing data to make the information more in the favor of the author.
• Ethical standards. Recent journal editorials presented some experience of unscrupulous activities.
  • Human Welfare Concerns. The guidelines for human experimentation started during WWII with the Nuremberg Code. It has evolved into three main principles from The Belmont Report. The subject must be able to make their own choices to protect themselves, benefits must outweigh the risks, and subjects must be evaluated for their selection and benefits must go to all of society.
  • Animal Welfare Concerns. Is the ethical care of animals in scientific experiments. The APS has set strict guidelines and regulations to stop animals from being unnecessarily harmed in experiments. These are being updated regularly by the APS and is a federal law in the United States enforced by DHHS.
• Authorship. Who may claim a right to authorship? In which order should the authors be listed?
  • Conflicts of Interests. This is referring to the biased assumption due to private interest. It can be done knowingly or not. This is unethical because it makes data inaccurate.
  • Authors Disputes. The authorship of an article is simply the author of the article. The ethical issue with this is when there are two people that believe to be the author, but there is only one true author. There are guidelines to help pick which get authorship of the writing. The one that does not get authorship is put in the acknowledgments. The guidelines come from NIH and The Council of Science Editors.

History[edit source]

Scientific literature took place in the form of letters, books, and other writings. It was published and produced by individual people hoping to be shared with others for research purposes. Mainly the writing is published for peer-reviewed journal articles that were started in the mid-1600's. Meaning at least two scientists with the same expertise in the same area of science comment on the article and decide whether they should publish it or not. That later is for the public and other scientists or whoever wants to read about it if they want knowledge on the certain topic. A lot of the research was short summaries of other journals or books so that people had the latest versions of the knowledge instead of research that was from a long time ago. Everything that is published must be written down and recorded so that if others want to read or add to the research they can. They include citations to any number of earlier studies that other work can be built on and later cited as well.

Retractions of Articles[edit source]

Causes[edit source]

Causes for retraction can come from fraud or suspected fraud, error, plagiarism, and because the publication is a duplicate of another. A website called PubMed references about twenty-five million articles related to biomedical research that have been published since the 1940's. About two thousand of these were retracted the first being in 1977, therefore, making retractions very recent in the biomedical field.

The Trend of Retractions[edit source]

The number of retractions made in recent history was found to be true, but not uniform among cases of retractions. Article retractions from fraud in the 1990's were increased and also repeated during the last decade. A less dramatic increase from error was also observed during the same time. However, plagiarism and duplicate publications were only increasing from 2005 making them very recent. Retractions of fraud and the number of recent publications cannot be the only things contributing to the increase in fraud and suspected fraud because since 1975 the number of retractions from those issues has increased by ten times from the original number.