Frédérique Bordignon

ABSTRACT Open repositories were created to enhance access and visibility of scholarly publications, driven by open science ideals emphasising transparency and accessibility. However, they lack mechanisms to update the status of corrected or retracted publications, posing a threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. To explore the scope of the problem, a manually verified corpus was examined: we extracted all the entries in the Crossref × Retraction Watch database for which the publication date of the corrected or retracted document ranged from 2013 to 2023. This corresponded to 24,430 entries with a DOI, which we use to query Unpaywall and identify their possible indexing in HAL, an open repository (second largest institutional repository worldwide). In most cases (91%), HAL does not mention corrections. While the study needs broader scope, it highlights the necessity of improving the role of open repositories in correction processes with better curation practices. We discuss how harvesting operations and the interoperability of platforms can maintain the integrity of the entire scholarly record. Not only will the open repositories avoid damaging its reliability through ambiguous reporting, but on the contrary, they will also strengthen it.

AIM: This survey-based study (982 participants) explores chemistry researchers' practices and motivations in correcting errors in scientific publications. RESULTS: While respondents believe errors should be corrected in principle, practical challenges arise due to scientific, social, and pragmatic factors. These include the perceived seriousness of the error, its scientific impact, the age of the publication, and the time required. Difficulties also stem from criticizing others, especially senior colleagues. Despite these challenges, researchers are motivated to correct errors to limit their spread, contribute to the common good, and advance their own work. Researchers prefer informal error correction through private correspondence, discussions with colleagues, or teaching situations, over formal corrections to the scholarly record. The peer-review stage is crucial for detecting and correcting errors, but it is criticized for its deficiencies, including lack of professionalism among reviewers and editors. Some authors yield to reviewer pressure knowingly introducing changes that are clearly wrong. While the low participation rate (2%) does not allow generalization, the study shows that science correction is complex, involving a continuum of practices. CONCLUSION: To improve science correction, the study suggests that online platforms and repositories can facilitate the transition from off-the-record discussions to on-the-record initiatives, ultimately feeding into the public record.

We present here a corpus of 505 critical citation contexts, i.e. a set of sentences or propositions that contain at least one citation of a study towards which the author(s) has/have a negative opinion. Those contexts come from other existing annotated corpora, from our readings about critical citation and disagreement in science, and from contexts manually annotated by native speakers of English. We have re-annotated all those contexts in order to be sure that they match our definition of critical citations. This corpus can be helpful to train tools dedicated to the automatic retrieval of critical citations.

Abstract As the academic community has become increasingly concerned about the drifts of research evaluation, mostly researchers’ evaluation, because of the overreliance on metrics, many expert groups have made recommendations to improve the way researchers should be evaluated. In this study, we focus on the recommendation to use narrative curriculum vitae (CVs). We review 28 opinion pieces and 7 experiments to better understand what a narrative CV can refer to, and to explore whether the narrative function that is specific to this kind of CV is proving effective in response to the concerns raised by evaluation practices. A close reading of these documents reveals the conceptual basis of the narrative CV and the problems it is intended to solve; we propose five commonly reported features of the narrative CV: avoid lists, contextualize achievements, fight metrics, enlarge the spectrum of contributions taken into consideration and foster diversity and inclusion. But the promoters of the narrative CV pay little to investigate how the narrative feature itself can lead to any benefits. However, the feedback collected from both applicants and evaluators is quite positive. Regardless of whether it is justified or not, the enthusiasm aroused by the implementation of this new type of CV undeniably has the advantage of opening up the debate, raising awareness and calling to question the bad practices and biases that exist in the researchers’ assessment processes. The narrative nature of the CV is, in the end, just a pretext for raising interest and working towards the adoption of good practices.

To date, the study of hype has become a productive but also eclectic field of research. This introduction provides an overview of the core characteristics of technology hype and distinguishes it from other future-oriented concepts. Further, the authors present promising approaches from various disciplines for studying, critiquing, and dealing with hype. The special issue assembles case studies, methodological and theoretical contributions that analyze tech hypes’ temporality, agency, and institutional dynamics. It provides insights into how hypes are triggered and fostered, but also how they can be deconstructed and anticipated.

To date, the study of hype has become a productive but also eclectic field of research. This introduction provides an overview of the core characteristics of technology hype and distinguishes it from other future-oriented concepts. Further, the authors present promising approaches from various disciplines for studying, critiquing, and dealing with hype. The special issue assembles case studies, methodological and theoretical contributions that analyze tech hypes’ temporality, agency, and institutional dynamics. It provides insights into how hypes are triggered and fostered, but also how they can be deconstructed and anticipated.

Abstract Data is one of the most used terms in scientific vocabulary. This article focuses on the relationship between data and research by analyzing the contexts of occurrence of the word data in a corpus of 72,471 research articles (1980–2012) from two distinct fields (Social sciences, Physical sciences). The aim is to shed light on the issues raised by research on data, namely the difficulty of defining what is considered as data, the transformations that data undergo during the research process, and how they gain value for researchers who hold them. Relying on the distribution of occurrences throughout the texts and over time, it demonstrates that the word data mostly occurs at the beginning and end of research articles. Adjectives and verbs accompanying the noun data turn out to be even more important than data itself in specifying data. The increase in the use of possessive pronouns at the end of the articles reveals that authors tend to claim ownership of their data at the very end of the research process. Our research demonstrates that even if data-handling operations are increasingly frequent, they are still described with imprecise verbs that do not reflect the complexity of these transformations.

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Abstract The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader's attention. The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers. Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre‐pandemic period. We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may). Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results. The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID‐19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over‐promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.

An abstract is not only a mirror of the full article; it also aims to draw attention to the most important information of the document it summarizes. Many studies have compared abstracts with full texts for their informativeness. In contrast to previous studies, we propose to investigate this relation based not only on the amount of information given by the abstract but also on its importance. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new metric called GEM to measure the "generosity" or representativeness of an abstract. Schematically speaking, a generous abstract should have the best possible score of similarity for the sections important to the reader. Based on a survey of 630 researchers, we were able to weight sections according to their importance. In our approach, seven sections were first automatically detected in the full text. The accuracy of this classification into sections was above 80% compared with a dataset of documents where sentences were assigned to sections by experts. Second, each section was weighted according to the survey results. The GEM score was then calculated as a sum of weights of sections in the full text corresponding to sentences in the abstract normalized over the total sum of weights of sections in the full text. The correlation between GEM score and the mean of the scores assigned by annotators was higher than the correlation between scores from different experts. As a case study, the GEM score was calculated for 36,237 articles in environmental sciences (1930–2013) retrieved from the ISTEX database. The main result was that GEM score has increased over time. Moreover, this trend depends on subject area and publisher. No correlation was found between GEM score and citation rate or open access status of articles. We conclude that abstracts are more generous in recent publications and cannot be considered as mere teasers. This research should be pursued in greater depth, particularly by examining structured abstracts. GEM score could be a valuable indicator for exploring large numbers of abstracts, by guiding the reader in the choice of whether or not to obtain and read full text.

This dataset has been created to allow comparative studies of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (from 01/01/2020 to 12/04/2020) relative to abstracts produced in 2019, the closest pre-pandemic period. The dataset has 2 files: - a txt file with the queries we ran in Dimensions and Lens to create the whole corpus and retrieve metadata - a csv file with the metadata for all preprints in the corpus and the positive, negative and hedge words we extracted with CorTexT Manager tool.

National audience

L'enquête a été menée auprès de chercheurs via l'envoi à des listes de diffusion et via des appels à participation sur Twitter entre le 24/08/2016 et le 27/09/2016. En langue française.

International audience

A defining feature of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly communication has been the brief and intense surge in the production of preprints. This has had significant impacts on the ways in which new research findings have been reported and communicated more broadly and the role played by abstracts in highlighting the meaning and value of new research. Based on a study of the language deployed in the abstracts of recently published COVID-19 preprints, Frédérique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova and Marianne Noël, argue two defining features of these abstracts are over-promotion and hedging, a deliberate ambiguity that suggests authors should pay greater attention to what they seek to communicate in their abstracts.

Le véhicule autonome dans les discours médiatisés : présentation des méthodes d'analysed'articles de presse et de tweets