For the last few days, social media is flooded with a viral topic, a researcher being humiliated on a TV talk show. There are a lot of public opinions floating in the air. Most of the tones are ashamed and angry. Public reactions might come out of a respectful emotion toward a lonely researcher in front of three journalists, troubled by a lot of irrelevant questions. However, very few of those sympathizers know what a research article is, as they might not need to write any article during their student life. Astonishingly, many of them are university graduates! It is not their fault obviously, it is a glitch in our education system, where a student’s lab report or even thesis report is copied by another, and some similar reports are being copied from generation to generation!
Most of the students are not familiar with some of the buzzwords of research article writing such as plagiarism, journal, conference, citation, indexing, and so on. This article will try to describe some key terms related to research articles. You may no longer be a student, but in the life-long learning process, it is always better to learn late than never. It should be mentioned here that, even this author had no idea about research articles in his university days! We all are victims of our education system.
Research articles are nothing but structured scientific reports to publish the outcomes and implications of research work. Research works have also some structured framework to conduct whether it is done in a laboratory or on a social ground. The world of research is too vast to describe in a few words, rather it demands passion and practice to learn research techniques little by little. However, we will be confined to just the buzzwords related to research articles, thus helping you to understand some basics about research article writing and publishing.
Plagiarism: If you copy text or ideas from another person, it is plagiarism. This is an unethical practice for writing research articles. Do you want to publish an article? Do some research by yourself, and then publish the results. Never copy from others. If you need to take help from others’ work, cite them accordingly. Now the question is, how to cite or what is a citation?
Citation: Referring to one’s work in your article is citing. There are some rules for citations indeed. You cannot just copy and paste from an article, even if you cite that. You must describe that author’s idea in your word. At this point, paraphrasing comes as a solution, but not always. We will discuss it in the next paragraph. Before that, we need to know, if citations for research work are counted. The more citations for an article, the more accepted the article is. Similarly, citations for an author are also counted, and more cited authors are more accepted among the scientific communities. You may compare this citation count with the number of ‘likes’ for your Facebook post. An article that has 100 citations means that the article has been cited (rather read liked!) by 100 articles’ authors. You can find this citation count in Google Scholar.
Paraphrasing: “Dhaka is an overpopulated city”. If you write this sentence as “Dhaka city has crossed its population limit”, that will be a paraphrasing. Nowadays there is a lot of software to check plagiarism. And as a fun fact, there is a lot of software to paraphrase as well! Some plagiarism checkers are developed with very simple programming logic. If 5-6 words of your written sentence are exactly placed in a similar order to another sentence from another article, the software will detect it as plagiarism. In that case, some cunning people may copy a whole article from another person, use paraphrasing software, and can cheat the plagiarism software! That’s why some modern software comes with translating logic to detect such line-by-line ‘paraphrased plagiarism’.
Google Scholar: It is a specially designed search engine by Google to search only scientific or research articles. You simply search “Google Scholar” in your regular Google search tab, and you will find the separate Google Scholar tab. Now search by any topic, keywords, or author’s name, that will provide you with all the relevant articles related to your search string.
Peer review: When you want to publish your research outcomes, you must write an article to submit to a scientific conference or a journal. Your outcomes may be flawed, your claims may be wrong, or your challenges to established theory may lack evidence. Who will judge them? Here come the peer reviewers. In general, they are experts in the field of that research work. For simplicity, we may conclude them as an examiner of your work, and the minimum required number of peer-reviewer for each article is two. Some quality journals and conferences may involve more than two peer reviewers for a single article. They review the article and accept or reject it. Sometimes they provide suggestions to improve the quality of the article. Peer review may be double-blind, when reviewers and authors, no one knows about others, thus confirming the highest transparency of accepting an article to be published. Sometimes, the process is single-blind, when reviewers see the authors’ names but authors’ cannot know who the reviewers are.
Conference and Proceeding: Scientific conference is a gathering of the scientific community. They meet together, share their ideas with written papers, and present them in front of others. Therefore, conferences are mainly idea-sharing platforms. Researchers can be aware of what the current trends of research are. The papers that are presented at a conference are archived in an online database which is known as a Proceeding. Conference papers are not often considered complete research, rather they are idea-sharing, incomplete outcomes of ongoing works or research works with very little contribution. For this reason, the archive of conference papers is known as a proceeding.
Journal: The ultimate platform for scientific publications is journals. The peer-review process for accepting a journal article is stricter than the conference peer review. So a researcher needs to show the highest dedication to writing a journal article. While a conference paper may be accepted within 2-3 days, a journal article requires 3 months to even 2 years! So, it demands extreme passion from the researchers as well. You know what? Where there is the involvement of passion and emotion, there will always be some fraud to cheat you. This has brought the concept of predatory journals.
Predatory Journals: As the name indicates, a predator will hunt you. Do you want to publish your research outcomes? Some journals will offer you to accept your article without a peer review in exchange for money. Some authors fear the lengthy peer review processes, and they search for a shortcut. Predatory journals target these impatient authors who seek a way of publishing a research article without being passionate. But be careful! An article published in such predatory journals may destroy your research career forever. Here you should know about open access, indexing, impact factor, and quartile of a journal to avoid fraud attempts from a predatory journal.
Open Access Journals: Some journals will ask you to pay to read their published articles, and some journals are free. Those later mentioned free journals are known as open-access journals. Why does a journal ask for money to read their published articles? It is natural. If you want to read a novel, you need to buy a book. Similarly, if you want to read a research article, you need to buy it too. However, some open-access journals are published and funded by many charity organizations, and those are free to the readers. On the other hand, some journals ask for money from the authors and then make their articles free for the readers. Does it not sound funny that you write for them, and you pay for them? It may, but research articles are prestigious things, at the same time business advertisements in some cases. That is a different topic, we may discuss it some other time.
Indexing: Predatory journals ask for money from the authors, and open-access journals do the same. Then what is the difference between these two? The simple answer is indexing. There are some accepted organizations by all the scientific communities of the world that index the journals in their database based on the quality, credibility, and transparency of the journals. Scopus and DOAJ are two such well-accepted indexing databases. There are many other journal indexing databases as well. By the way, before reading an article from a journal or writing an article for a journal, always remember to check the indexing of that journal to confirm its credibility.
Impact Factor: It is a ratio of the citation count for a journal to the number of published articles of that journal within a specific period. How much impact a journal can impose on the scientific community or the acceptance rate of the journal among the scientific community can be determined from that ratio. So, in short, a high-impact factor journal is a comparatively more accepted journal. However, impact factors can vary from field to field. For example, a journal of medical technology, or computer science will have a larger impact factor than a journal of physics. You can assume the reason. Medical science or computer science is changing every day, so the volume of research articles published in those fields is comparatively larger than in the field of pure physics. More articles mean more citations, and more citations mean more impact factors.
Quartile: This is the last topic I would like to tell you. You may remember, in that TV talk show which I mentioned at the beginning, the scientist tried to say that they published their article in a Q1 journal. This is the quartile. In general, the quartile is one-fourth. There are four quartiles, Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. All the journals published in a specific field throughout the world are divided into four quartiles based on their impact factors. The first 25% is Q1, the second 25% is Q2, and so on. That means Q1 journals are with the highest impact, and Q4 journals are with the lowest impact.
I think I have covered all the buzzwords to know before starting to read, write, or even discuss a research article. Every educated person does not need to be a researcher, but everyone who claims him/herself as educated should know what a research article is. As a general reader, you often cannot understand a research article, and that is normal. To understand a research article on a specific field, you have to have specialized knowledge of that field. But at least you should understand, “I do not understand”! Only then, such an embarrassing situation that occurred on that TV talk show will not repeat.
Md. Tanvir Siraj is a mechanical and industrial production engineer as well as a researcher
