Writing scientific papers

Rules for affiliating scientific publications by employees, doctoral students and students of the Poznań University of Medical Sciences – Order of the Rector of Poznań University of Medical Sciences No. 101/25

Bibliography manager is an IT tool used to manage and organize bibliographies when writing scientific papers. They allow you to collect cited sources, generate bibliographic descriptions according to various standards (styles) depending on the publisher's requirements.

The most popular bibliography managers are:

Why use a bibliography manager?

  • allows you to collect bibliographic records (download them from databases, the Internet, enter them manually)
  • we enter the data into the manager only once, and we can use it in all subsequent articles
  • manager allows you to choose a bibliographic style. We can choose from several thousand styles, often prepared in accordance with the requirements of specific journals. It is the manager who ensures that the reference is properly formatted, so that subsequent items in the bibliography have the same shape
  • with one click we can change the bibliographic style, e.g. from Vancouver to APA
  • with one click we can place a bibliography in the work
  • cooperate with text editors to create an appendix bibliography, e.g. for the needs of a publication being prepared

       

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) is a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary developed by the National Library of Medicine® (USA), updated annually. It is used, among other things, to index publications in databases (e.g. MEDLINE®) and to catalog collections of books, journals and multimedia. The presented version of MeSHPol is the Polish translation of the original MeSH vocabulary.

Medical Subject Headings MeSHPol

Match Manuscript – supports the process of selecting an appropriate journal whose thematic scope corresponds to the topic of the abstract. Provides comprehensive information about the journal that may be interested in publishing an article corresponding to the abstract entered in the search engine. It is an impartial tool: Clarivate (the company responsible for the tool) is in no way affiliated with the publishing market.
Using the search engine is possible after creating an individual account (the same as for the Web of Science database).

Journal Finder on pages chosen publications:

Predatory Magazines/Predatory Publishers (Predatory Journals/Predatory Publishers) – these are entities using an unethical business model in which fees are charged for the publication of a scientific article without a guarantee of reliable editorial services.

The phenomenon was documented and publicized by Jeffrey Beall, an American librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, who in 2012 published a list of potential predatory open access publishers on the Scholary Open Access blog. The list was used to identify publishers that engaged in unethical practices. In January 2017, Beall deactivated his blog and the List due to numerous lawsuits and threats of defamation lawsuits from publishers.
Currently, you can read many articles and studies on the topic, including: Letter from the NCN director regarding predatory journals [121 KB, PDF].

Predatory journals are characterized by a lack of transparency in their procedures (about editorial decisions, fees, peer review process, etc.), aggressive author acquisition methods, and false or misleading information. In practice, they will publish anything sent to them as long as the author pays a fee.

Criteria characterizing so-called predatory journals (partly also applicable to predatory conferences):

  • lack of a fair review and editing process
  • the full address of the publisher is missing or the data provided is false. Most often, there is only an e-mail contact form
  • fictitious editorial team (invented names or names of recognized scientists, also in the review process, who have never collaborated with a given publishing house, are given as members of the editorial team)
  • editorial staff use email addresses from widely available domains, such as gmail.com or yahoo.com" (Krajewski 2016)
  • posting on the magazine's website:
    – false bibliometric indicators such as Impact Factor (IF) or replacing them with other indicators with a similar name, e.g. world impact factor, view factor, science impact factor, global impact factor, unofficial impact factor, etc.
    – information that the journal's content is indexed in recognized abstract databases
  • titles very similar to the titles of prestigious magazines (often the differences are limited to adding one word or a plural to the name)
  • lack of verification of the originality of texts in terms of plagiarism
  • conducting an aggressive campaign (often via email) among scientists asking them to submit their work
  • no information on the website about the fee for publishing articles (information is sent by e-mail directly to the author)
  • they publish almost anything that is sent to them, as long as a fee is paid. The fee is paid up front, without waiting for acceptance of the manuscript
  • accept articles submitted by authors for publication in less than a month, without reviewer comments
  • do not maintain appropriate scientific standards during the review process of articles submitted for publication
  • they uncritically accept manuscripts rejected by other publishers
  • publishing a large number of articles (even several thousand) per year
  • no established rules for withdrawal (retraction) of publications
  • charging fees for adding people as co-authors of articles despite knowing that they have not made any contribution

Verifying journals are worth using the service Think. Check. Submit.. It provides checklists of questions to ask before submitting your manuscript to a journal.

It may also be helpful A table listing over 400 journals suspected of predatory practices and the reasons for their removal from international databases [last updated 2021].
The author of the list is Jolanta Szczepaniak (Łódź University of Technology Publishing House). The methodology was described in the Academic Forum 4/2021 as part of the article "Potentially predatory in the list of journals".

Recommended publications:

1. Burdzik, T., Predatory journals as an example of unethical publishing. Philosophy and Science. Philosophical and interdisciplinary studies 2017; 5:131–149

2.  Sorokowski, P., Kulczycki, E., Sorokowska, A. et al. Predatory journals recruit fake editor. Nature 2017; 543:481–483 (2017)  – file available after logging in to the UMP network

3. Burdzik, T., Predatory conferences: unethical conference practices that threaten science. Social contexts 2017;5(10):118-124

 

Predatory conferences (ang. predatory conferences, predatory meetings) – scientifically unethical conferences, without a fair review process of submitted presentation proposals. Their goal, similarly to predatory journals, is to achieve the highest possible profit from registration fees and fees for post-conference publications in open access by obtaining the largest possible number of participants. Predatory conferences are not organized by scientific societies or institutions, but by individuals or companies that specialize in organizing such events in almost all fields of science. Predatory conferences are often organized by predatory publishing houses.

Criteria that characterize predatory conferences:

  • the invitation is not sent from an institutional address
  • the identity and location of the organizers' headquarters are hidden
  • invitations are sent to people unrelated to the issues discussed at the conference
  • the conference organizer is its sponsor
  • the conference organizer organizes conferences on different topics at the same time in the same or different places
  • the conference organizers use academic titles/degrees that they do not hold
  • placing logos of renowned institutions on the conference website, which is supposed to indicate cooperation, even though such a situation does not occur
  • the names of the conferences are very similar to the names of conferences organized by prestigious scientific centers (thus, they additionally receive the same acronym as the legal conference)
  • describing the conference as "international" even though the organizing committee and the participants presenting the papers are mostly from one country
  • the person submitting the presentation receives acceptance before the conference registration deadline

When verifying the conference, it is worth using the service Think. Check. Attend. It provides checklists with questions to ask yourself before paying the conference fee.

see Copyright and Intellectual Property Law

see Open Publishing in UMP  

Jisc (previously named: Sherpa Romeo) – is a free service that allows you to become familiar with publishers’ policies regarding the author’s rights to post materials in repositories, open access databases and on their own website.
The search engine allows you to answer the question of whether the author has the right to publish his or her article from a given journal in such sources.
The tool is recommended for checking the openness policies of individual publishers and their journals.

List of magazines by category