Research integrity in publishing is an important topic that is not often taught to researchers through their institution or by publishers. The new Web of Science™ Academy offers researchers around the world an opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge, making them better researchers, peer reviewers and journal editorial board members. Courses will help researchers to:
- gain skills and confidence,
- improve the quality of their research outputs, and
- maneuver the academic publishing space, while maintaining high integrity standards.
Context leads to better referencing and better metrics
The first course available in the Web of Science Academy, “Good citation behavior,” covers how to reference, when to reference and where in your manuscript you should reference other work. It also explores what citation manipulation is and how to prevent it. We can all play a part in responsible referencing by making sure there is relevant context for using a reference. The goal of this course is to support good referencing practices and thus good citation behavior, which in turn will lead to more robust citation metrics.
At Clarivate, we are committed to supporting the research community’s efforts to practice research more responsibly, and to promoting more responsible use of metrics in research evaluation. Current citation metrics are often criticized for not putting a researcher’s impact into context1. For example, how does a researcher’s citation count compare to other researchers in the same field? If a citation count increases over time, this should be taken into consideration during researcher assessment. One way we are addressing this is through our newly released Author Impact Beamplots metric on Web of Science author records, more on that here.
Why research integrity skills are important
Research is built upon already published research. It is therefore paramount that high quality and ethical standards are upheld; otherwise, new research might be flawed, and journal and research metrics might not represent true impact.
Research integrity standards bring trust to the scientific process. We all have a shared responsibility to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record for the new generations of researchers yet to come. One way we at Clarivate are supporting research integrity is by offering free training through the Web of Science Academy.
For more information on what Clarivate and our Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ are doing within the research integrity space, watch this recording from our inaugural research integrity event. Held in November 2020, it features Australia’s chief scientist and other Australian stakeholders within government, institutions, funders and publishers. For further insight, please also see our recent research integrity report, Research Integrity: Understanding our shared responsibility for a sustainable scholarly ecosystem, summarized and linked to in this post.
Practical information
In keeping with our mission to promote more responsible use of metrics in research evaluation, the Web of Science Academy is free and publicly available. Simply register and login to begin learning. After completion of each course, a certificate will be available for print or download. We will release new courses throughout the year, including peer review training previously available from the Publons Academy. Integrating Publons Academy courses with the newly launched Web of Science Academy will provide a better user experience for our learners and mentors.
Course offerings will be relevant for early career as well as senior researchers and editors from all research fields. We welcome librarians and research administrators to promote the Web of Science Academy to their students and faculty. We will share information later this year about more in-depth training offerings for institutions that wish to improve capacity building of their researcher faculty community.
Register for the Web of Science Academy
1 Profiles, not Metrics (2019) J. Adams, M. McVeigh, D. Pendlebury, M. Szomszor. Web of Science report.
