Project description:The editors of Materials would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2013 [...].
Project description:The editors of Materials would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2015. [...].
Project description:Materials instituted an annual award in order to acknowledge outstanding papers in the area of materials science and engineering published in Materials. [...].
Project description:Results from the international cooperative programme on effects on materials including historic and cultural monuments are presented from the period 1987-2014 and include pollution data (SO?, NO?, O?, HNO? and PM10), corrosion data (carbon steel, weathering steel, zinc, copper, aluminium and limestone) and data on the soiling of modern glass for nineteen industrial, urban and rural test sites in Europe. Both one-year and four-year corrosion data are presented. Corrosion and pollution have decreased significantly and a shift in the magnitude is generally observed around 1997: from a sharp decrease to a more modest decrease or to a constant level without any decrease. SO? levels, carbon steel and copper corrosion have decreased even after 1997, which is more pronounced in urban areas, while corrosion of the other materials shows no decrease after 1997, when looking at one-year values. When looking at four-year values, however, there is a significant decrease after 1997 for zinc, which is not evident when looking at the one-year values. This paper also presents results on corrosion kinetics by comparison of one- and four-year values. For carbon steel and copper, kinetics is relatively independent of sites while other materials, especially zinc, show substantial variation in kinetics for the first four years, which needs to be considered when producing new and possibly improved models for corrosion.
Project description:The number of contributing reviewers often outnumbers the authors of publications. This has led to apathy towards reviewing and the conclusion that the peer-review system is broken. Given the trade-offs between submitting and reviewing manuscripts, reviewers and authors naturally want visibility for their efforts. While study after study has called for revolutionizing publication practices, the current paradigm does not recognize reviewers' time and expertise. We propose the R-index as a simple way to quantify scientists' contributions as reviewers. We modelled its performance using simulations based on real data to show that early-mid career scientists, who complete high-quality reviews of longer manuscripts within their field, can perform as well as leading scientists reviewing only for high-impact journals. By giving citeable academic recognition for reviewing, R-index will encourage more participation with better reviews, regardless of the career stage. Moreover, the R-index will allow editors to exploit scores to manage and improve their review team, and for journals to promote high average scores as signals of a practical and efficient service to authors. Peer-review is a pervasive necessity across disciplines and the simple utility of this missing metric will credit a valuable aspect of academic productivity without having to revolutionize the current peer-review system.
Project description:Study design, statistical analysis, interpretation of results, and conclusions should be a part of all research papers. Statistics are integral to each of these components and are therefore necessary to evaluate during manuscript peer review. Research published in Toxicological Pathology is often focused on animal studies that may seek to compare defined treatment groups in randomized controlled experiments or focus on the reliability of measurements and diagnostic accuracy of observed lesions from preexisting studies. Reviewers should distinguish scientific research goals that aim to test sufficient effect size differences (i.e., minimizing false positive rates) from common toxicologic goals of detecting a harmful effect (i.e., minimizing false negative rates). This journal comprises a wide range of study designs that require different kinds of statistical assessments. Therefore, statistical methods should be described in enough detail so that the experiment can be repeated by other research groups. The misuse of statistics will impede reproducibility.
Project description:Authors endure considerable hardship carrying out biomedical research, from generating ideas to completing their manuscripts and submitting their findings and data (as is increasingly required) to a journal. When researchers submit to journals, they entrust their findings and ideas to editors and peer reviewers who are expected to respect the confidentiality of peer review. Inherent trust in peer review is built on the ethical conduct of authors, editors and reviewers, and on the respect of this confidentiality. If such confidentiality is breached by unethical reviewers who might steal or plagiarize the authors' ideas, researchers will lose trust in peer review and may resist submitting their findings to that journal. Science loses as a result, scientific and medical advances slow down, knowledge may become scarce, and it is unlikely that increasing bias in the literature will be detected or eliminated. In such a climate, society will ultimately be deprived from scientific and medical advances. Despite a rise in documented cases of abused peer review, there is still a relative lack of qualitative and quantitative studies on reviewer-related misconduct, most likely because evidence is difficult to come by. Our paper presents an assessment of editors' and reviewers' responsibilities in preserving the confidentiality of manuscripts during the peer review process, in response to a 2016 case of intellectual property theft by a reviewer. Our main objectives are to propose additional measures that would offer protection of authors' intellectual ideas from predatory reviewers, and increase researchers' awareness of the responsible reviewing of journal articles and reporting of biomedical research.