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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[edit source]

There are 10 different types of scientific literature. 8 of which carry specific objectives when writing them and the other 2 can vary depending on the style and the goal that is trying to be accomplished.

• 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 8 types of literature have specific goals

• 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.

These 2 have varying types of scientific classifications for the literature being written. they can range from historical articles to speeches.

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 source]

When it comes to ethics there are many ways it can be interpreted: when talking about scientific literature ethics involves issues in writing and experimental guidelines. These guidelines are set so that writers know what is acceptable and not acceptable. Ethics are important for the authors, the writers, and the scientific community.

Different Types of Ethical Issues in Scientific Publishing

Redundant Publications: Publications that articles that contain copyrighted and new unpublished material. This is not ethical because it is illegal to use others published works, a waste if reviewers time, pointlessly expands publication databases, and might create inaccurate data.

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.

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.

Duplicate Publications: This unethical method is very close to plagiarism and redundant publications. If an article is the same or close to the same as another article it is a duplicate publication. This is done to boost one’s reputation in their field. It also creates inaccurate overall data, since the same data was counted twice.

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.

Data Fabrication: Data fabrication is purposefully false data numbers. This is unethical because it makes the author and subject look bad, waste the time of those studying the data, and makes all fields of science look bad.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined as stealing another author’s work. You can use four simple steps to avoid plagiarism. Always cite the original content, use quotes when necessary, understand the text in your own words, and give a reference when you are unsure if it is needed.

Conflicts of Interests: A conflict of interest refers to a biased accusation made by an author. It can be done knowingly or not. When it is done knowingly it is due to private interest. This is unethical because it makes data inaccurate in the article.

History[edit source]

Scientific literature took place in the form of letters, books, and other writings. They were published and produced by individual people hoping to be shared with others for research purposes. Scientific writing in English came out in the 14th century and had continued to try to make scientific literature a lot better and easier by developing an industry that is for non-native English speaking authors. Scientific literature became popular, especially for medical purposes. Such as when people would record certain researches that helped people further along life. Such as finding ways to cure certain illnesses and those people who wrote the article or book so that others can use what others researched in hopes of being able to add to that research to make the discovery better. Today Scientific literature has expanded science by a lot it has also created challenges. 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.